Sensor Network Design and Implementation for Health Telecare and Diagnosis Assistance Applications

Attempts to develop a ubiquitous health care monitoring system arisen from the need of automatic real-time medical services for emergent diseases. Besides, the physiological statuses gathered and maintained by this system are very helpful for diagnosis and early warning. To improve the medical services and diagnosis accuracy, a Wireless Health Advanced Mobile Bio-diagnostic System (abbreviated as WHAM-BioS) is proposed. This study focuses on network/communication technology in the WHAM-BioS and proposes a novel clustered sensor network (CSN) architecture for long-term periodical telecare applications. In the proposed CSN architecture, most network functions are concentrated in a special purpose device called the human body gateway (HBG). The sensor nodes focus on detecting and reporting their detection results to their HBG. To reduce the design complexity and the implementation cost for the sensor nodes, the proposed architecture proposed several protocols to help each HBG to provide a contention free environment for their sensor nodes. The contention free environment significantly reduces the power consumption in data retransmission. Besides, to further reduce the power consumption of the sensor nodes, this study also proposes a power saving mechanism which reduces the power consumption in idle listening. Based on the proposed network architecture and protocols, a prototype system is implemented.