Wireless Sensor Networks for Home Health Care
Summary (1 min read)
Introduction
- Various economic and technological factors (e.g. Moore’s Law) have brought sophisticated electronics within the reach of average users.
- One important benefit is to help stem rising health care costs by increasing health observability and doctor-topatient efficiency.
- More specifically, this paper will discuss several of these projects, highlighting their need, design, implementation, and results.
- Demonstrate working prototypes with relatively simple technology which make incremental, but important, steps to toward ubiquitous deployment of health monitoring devices, as well as how they may be integrated into existing infrastructures.
II. TECHNOLOGIES
- The authors prototypes use two similar sensor network mote technologies: Tmote Sky and SHIMMER.
- The Tmote Sky is the latest derivative of the Berkeley Telos motes from Moteiv Corp. [1].
- The other mote is Intel’s Digital Health Group’s platform for Sensing Health with Intelligence, Modularity, Mobility, and Experimental Re-usability, or SHIMMER.
- Both are nearly identical with respect to processing and communication; each have the Chipcon CC2420 802.15.4 radio and TI MSP430 (with 10k RAM).
III. PROTOTYPES
- The authors have developed several prototypes which demonstrate wireless sensor network technologies for heath care at home.
- Each of these prototypes will be discussed in the following sections.
E. LISTSENse
- If people with a severe hearing impairment are included with those who are deaf, then the number is 4 to 10 times higher.
- At least half of these people reported their hearing loss after 64 years of age [9].
- The deployment of mote technology further reduces the cost of their prototype.
- Once the measured signal surpasses the reference value, an encrypted activation message is sent to the Base Station that incorporates the Transmitter address.
- Figures 5(b) and 5(c) shows the manufactured Base Station and Transmitter prototype that were successfully tested and evaluated.
IV. DISCUSSION
- Sophisticated, low-power, cheap, small, and mobile electronics will continue to permeate the home environment for a variety of applications, ranging from multi-media entertainment to home automation.
- Therefore, this figure shows that hospital costs will rise sharply and health-care at home is one way of alleviating this problem.
- Several technologies will be important to this evolution: sensor networks, RFID, and mobile consumer electronics.
- Software may be deployed on these devices to remind patients of their responsibilities (e.g. taking their pills and how much to take) and performing real-time analysis of patient data, given parameters set by their physician.
V. CONCLUSION
- Falling electronics prices and their increasing power, coupled with sensing technologies, promise to make health monitoring in one’s home, rather than frequent trips to the hospital, a reality.
- These prototypes represent incremental, but important steps towards ubiquitous deployment of health monitoring devices for the betterment of human lives.
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Citations
5 citations
Cites background from "Wireless Sensor Networks for Home H..."
...Un grand nombre d’applications de WSN est développé dans le domaine médical pour faire une télésurveillance des patients à domicile [13], équiper des patients par des capteurs relevant des informations médicales telles que le niveau d’oxygénation et les pulsations cardiaques (projet CodeBlue [14])....
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5 citations
Cites background from "Wireless Sensor Networks for Home H..."
...It intends to show a solution that may reduce the number of caregivers to only one [7-13]....
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...The automatic bath has position sensors to ensure the placement of the elderly; the whole system is controlled through the external monitor [11]....
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5 citations
Cites background from "Wireless Sensor Networks for Home H..."
...A wide range of WSN applications can be found for monitoring hostile environments such as wild forests [20], in medical healthcare [16] to promote health services, in household [17] items to make living easy and in industries [18] to obtain high-quality management....
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5 citations
5 citations