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Top1. Introduction
There has been enormous development in health informatics in the recent past mainly due to the huge progress in computer technology. The technology is used by physicians, pharmacists, managers and other healthcare professionals to understand the demand of stakeholders including patients through the specialized computer interactive media in the field of human computer interactions and these tools are designed with the help of wireless sensor networks (WSN) (Andrew, 2002) as shown in figure 1. The modern technological and scientific advances has made our life unexpectedly easier and comfortable. The developments are so rapid and notable that they can be witnessed in almost every field (Education, Medical, Agriculture, Transport, etc.). The most significant recent time electronic device which is gaining popularity, called sensor has the capability to perceive and sense various factors like intensity of light, moments among objects, speed, magnetism, under earth seismic waves, temperature, pressure and also medical vital signs among patients. These sensors has the ability to interact with other devices as well as themselves, collect data and store it for future processing whenever required. These sensors may communicate with a wired or wireless network. The extraordinary developments in computer technology has given rise to micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) systems that has enabled creation of small low-powered sensor nodes could form a wireless network. WSN is a infrastructure less network with a number of sensor-devices that work in coordination to achieve the intended result. They consist of a sink or a base-station and several sensors (sensor nodes). The base station collects data from all the sensors present in the network. The sensors are capable of processing information locally while interacting with the environment. A gateway node is a sensor node that collects information from other sensor nodes and sends it to the sink. The components of a sensor node are shown in figure 2.
Sensor nodes can be created as medical sensors and they will be designated several task related to monitoring human vital organs data by sensing them. These medical sensors will store, process and analyze this information to make important conclusions about human body conditions. They can detect any variations of the human vital signs (like a person’s blood pressure, ecg, pulse rate, body temperature, etc.) from their normal range and hence transfer this data to a medical practitioner or remote systems for further processing which will be used to determine the patient health. These medical sensors are could be either wearables or implanted on human organs/body(Darwish & Hassanien, 2011) (Dishongh, 2010).
Some categories of WMSNs are given below:
- 1.
Monitoring Clinical patients
- 2.
Elderly patients care monitoring
- 3.
Chronic patients monitoring
- 4.
Clinical data collection regularly
- 5.
Emergency Patient Monitoring
Figure 1.
Structural design of a WSN