Wireless distributed data acquisition system

Distributed data acquisition requires a flexible system organization, particularly when individual devices are mobile. The utility companies have been developing similar systems for several years now. In the case of medical devices, a mobile patient monitoring device would allow patients to leave the hospital and engage in normal activity, uploading physiological data only periodically. The wireless distributed data acquisition system presented in this paper is developed for mobile client devices, and mobile gateways. Each client device has some form of secondary storage, such as flash memory, to store the data that it acquired while it is not transmitting the data to the gateway device. The system maintains a database to keep track of the data acquired with respect to the data that it transmits to the gateway device. Each client device is uniquely identified. The gateway device polls client devices within its reach to transfer the client records to database. Gateways use existing communication infrastructure, such as cell phone link, and local connection to upload data to the server. We present the system developed around low-power microcontroller Texas Instruments MSP430F149, using standard 900 MHz wireless link, Smart Media Card as a secondary memory, and a portable PDA based gateway.