The mobile patient: wireless distributed sensor networks for patient monitoring and care

The concept of a three layer distributed sensor network for patient monitoring and care is introduced. The envisioned network has a leaf node layer (consisting of patient sensors), an intermediate node layer (consisting of the supervisory processor residing with each patient) and the root node processor (residing at a central monitoring facility). The paradigm has the capability of dealing with the bandwidth bottleneck at the wireless patient-root node link and the processing bottleneck at the central processor or root node of the network.