Developing residential wireless sensor networks for ECG healthcare monitoring

Wireless technology development has increased rapidly due to it’s convenience and cost effectiveness compared to wired applications, particularly considering the advantages offered by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based applications. Such applications exist in several domains including healthcare, medical, industrial and home automation. In the present study, a home-based wireless ECG monitoring system using Zigbee technology is considered. Such systems can be useful for monitoring people in their own home as well as for periodic monitoring by physicians for appropriate healthcare, allowing people to live in their home for longer. Health monitoring systems can continuously monitor many physiological signals and offer further analysis and interpretation. The characteristics and drawbacks of these systems may affect the wearer’s mobility during monitoring the vital signs. Real-time monitoring systems record, measure, and monitor the heart electrical activity while maintaining the consumer’s comfort. Zigbee devices can offer low-power, small size, and a low-cost suitable solution for monitoring the ECG signal in the home, but such systems are often designed in isolation, with no consideration of existing home control networks and smart home solutions. The present study offers a state of the art review and then introduces the main concepts and contents of the wireless ECG monitoring systems. In addition, models of the ECG signal and the power consumption formulas are highlighted. Challenges and future perspectives are also reported. The paper concludes that such mass-market health monitoring systems will only be prevalent when implemented together with home environmental monitoring and control systems

Dictionary memory based software architecture for distributed bluetooth low energy host controllers enabling high coverage in consumer residential healthcare environments

Technology has been seen as a possible solution to the increasing costs of healthcare and the globally aging population. It is known that many elderly people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as possible and remote monitoring can be a solution, but often such systems lack useful information or are prohibitive due to cost, ease of use/deployment and wireless coverage. This work presents a novel gateway software architecture based on threads being managed by dictionary memory. The architecture has been deployed in a distributed interconnected set of low-cost consumer grade gateway devices using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that are positioned around the home. The gateway devices can then be used to listen, monitor or connect to BLE based healthcare sensors to continually reveal information about the user with full residential coverage. A further novelty of this work is the ability to maintain handover connections between many sensors and many gateways as a user moves throughout their home, thus the gateways can route information to/from sensors across the consumer’s home network. The system has been tested in an experimental house and is now poised to be initially deployed to 100 homes for residential healthcare monitoring before any public mass consumer deployment

Implementation of Local Transport Protocol Library (LTPlib) into Real-time Operating System (RTOS)

Healthcare is getting more expensive overtime. Personal telehealth systems, including remote patient monitoring and management, can facilitate caregiver to effectively deliver high-quality healthcare service at lower cost. The recent developments in information and communication technologies have increased the degree of connectivity between people using smart devices. To further enhance these developments, implementation of the Local Transport Protocol library is ported to a micro real-time operating system to achieve a low cost yet highly efficient embedded system.The selected hardware and software provide easy interface for data transfer from a monitoring and measuring device to remote locations. Targeting the Continua Health Alliance compliancy as the future task of this research and development work can be a significant contribution to the future of healthcare monitoring system

Design and Implementation of Continua Compliant Wireless Medical Gateway

Collecting data from various medical devices associated with a patient at one location and sending it to a caregiver at another location in an integrated format is a challenge in telehealth systems. This challenge comes from following factors. First, these medical devices are not equipped with long range communication technologies. Second, medical devices from different manufacturers lack interoperability. Third, communication time is inconsistent. In order to address above challenges, a Continua compliant Wireless Medical Gateway (WMG) is designed and implemented in this research using various hardware components such as BeagleBone Black, Stollmann adapter and Unison Real-Time OS (RTOS). Being complaint to Continua enables interoperability between medical devices from different manufacturers. The selected hardware and software provide easy interface for data transfer over long range. The prototype has been tested extensively using various scenarios to calculate the total communication time, delay consistency and data accuracy. The results show the consistent deviation in communication time for WMG

Smart Automation By Using Zigbee and GSM

This paper includes automation of electrical devices based upon the presence of an occupant. The number of persons going in and out of a room or lab is counted using a counting mechanism. The network is created using Zigbee transceivers. In every room, a Zigbee transceiver known as an end device. The computer has a GUI interface for the users to control the devices and also to monitor the status of the devices. For providing remote access to the user a GSM modem interfaces with the central computer or PC. This paper shows the design and implementation of a novel low-power, low-cost and hand-held wireless device called a SensePod. Senseo pods can be used by a consumer to interact with a smart home or room using simple gestures like rubbing, taping or rolling the device on any home surface like a dining table. The device is smaller and forms an ad-hoc wireless network using the ZigBee protocol, and it can be easily interfaced to existing home management systems using a Universal Serial Bus (USB) port.

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

A Mobile ECG Monitoring System with Context Collection

An objective of a health process is one where patients can stay healthy with the support of expert medical advice when they need it, at any location and any time. An associated aim would be the development of a system which places increased emphasis on preventative measures as a first point of contact with the patient. This research is a step along the road towards this type of preventative healthcare for cardiac patients. It seeks to develop a smart mobile ECG monitoring system that requests and records context information about what is happening around the subject when an arrhythmia event occurs. Context information about the subject’s activities of daily living will, it is hoped, provide an enriched data set for clinicians and so improve clinical decision making. As a first step towards a mobile cardiac wellness guidelines system, the focus of this work is to develop a system that can receive bio-signals wirelessly, analyzing and storing the bio-signal in a handheld device and can collect context information when there are significant changes in bio-signs. For this purpose the author will use a low cost development environment to program a state of the art wireless prototype on a handheld computer that detects and responds to changes in the heart rate as calculated form the interval between successive heart beats. Although the general approach take in this work could be applied to a wide range of bio-signals, the research will focus on ECG signals. The pieces of the system are, A wireless receiver, data collection and storage module An efficient real time ECG beat detection algorithm A rule based (Event-Condition-Action) interactive system A simple user interface, which can request additional information form the user. A selection of real-time ECG detection algorithms have been investigated and one algorithm was implemented in MATLAB [110] and then in Java [142] for this project. In order to collect ECG signals (and in principle any signals) the generalised data collection architecture has also been developed utilizing Java [142] and Bluetooth [5] technology. This architecture uses an implementation of the abstract factory pattern [91] to ensure that the communication channel can be changed conveniently. Another core part of this project is a “wellness” guideline based on Event-Condition-Action (E-C-A) [68] production rule approach that originated in active databases. The work also focuses on design of a guideline based expert system which an E-C-A based implementation will be fully event driven using the Java programming language. Based on the author’s experience and the literature review, some important issues in mobile healthcare along with the corresponding reasons, consequences and possible solutions will be presented

Mobiles Online-Erfassungssystem für telemedizinische Anwendungen in der arbeits- und präventivmedizinischen Forschung

Das in dieser Arbeit vorgestellte Erfassungssystem erlaubt die kabellose, kontinuierliche Überwachung verschiedener physiologischer und dialogbasierter Parameter eines Patienten unabhängig von dessen Standort und dem des Untersuchers. Das Zusammenwirken moderner Übertragungstechnologien mit mobilen Sensor- und Rechnersystemen ermöglicht eine erhebliche Steigerung der Untersuchungsqualität. Das entwickelte System arbeitet vollautomatisiert und wurde bis dato von insgesamt über 150 Probanden, im Rahmen präventiv- und arbeitsmedizinischer Untersuchungen, getestet