A Smart Gateway for Health Care System Using Wireless Sensor Network

Using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in health care system has yielded a tremendous effort in recent years. However, in most of these researches, tasks like sensor data processing, health state decisions making and emergency messages sending are completed by a remote server. Transmitting and handing with a large scale of data from body sensors and home sensors consume a lot of communication resource, bring a burden to the remote server and delay the decision time and notification time. In this paper, we present a prototype of a smart gateway that we have implemented. This gateway is an interconnection and services management platform especially for WSN health care systems at home environment. By building a bridge between a WSN and public communication networks, and being compatible with an on-board data decision system and a lightweight database, our smart gateway system is enabled to make patients' health state decisions in low-power and low-cost embedded system and get faster response time o the emergencies. We have also designed the communication protocols between WSN, gateway and remote servers. Additionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi and GSM/GPRS communication module are integrated into the smart gateway in order to report and notify information to care-givers. We have conducted experiments on the proposed smart gateway by performing it together with a wireless home e-health care sensor network. The results show that the smart gateway design is feasible and has low latency.