Design and Implementation of a Mobile-Care System over Wireless Sensor Network for Home Healthcare Applications

According to home healthcare requirement of chronic patients, this paper proposes a mobile-care system integrated with a variety of vital-sign monitoring, where all the front-end vital-sign measuring devices are portable and have the ability of short-range wireless communication. In order to make the system more suitable for home applications, the technology of wireless sensor network is introduced to transmit the captured vital signs to the residential gateway by means of multi-hop relay. Then the residential gateway uploads data to the care server via Internet to carry out patient's condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. Furthermore, the system is added in the alarm mechanism, which the portable care device is able to immediately perceive the critical condition of the patient and to send a warning message to medical and nursing personnels in order to achieve the goal of prompt rescue