Recent technological advances in wireless communications and wireless sensor networks have enabled the design of intelligent, tiny, low-cost, and lightweight medical sensor nodes that can be placed on the human body strategically. The focus of this chapter is to implement the health monitoring system continuously without hospitalization using wearable sensors and create a wireless body area network (WBAN). Wearable sensors monitor the parameters of the human body like temperature, pressure, and heart beat by using sensors and providing real-time feedback to the user and medical staff and WBANs promise to revolutionize health monitoring. In this chapter, medical sensors are used to collect physiological data from patients and transmit it to the system which has details of an individual stored using Bluetooth/Wi-Fi with the help of Arduino and to medical server using Wi-Fi/3G communications.
TopIntroduction
The health problem is rising along with increasing population in the today’s world. In hospitals, continuous monitoring is needed for heart attack, after major/minor operation, temperature related illness, physical disorders. But the 24x7 monitoring of patients is difficult and leads to high cost. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with intelligent sensor nodes are becoming significant enabling technology for wide range applications. Recent technology advances in integration and miniaturization of physical sensors, microprocessors, and radio interfaces on a single chip, have enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks suitable for many applications. One of the most promising uses of WSNs is healthcare monitoring. In the medical field, sensor is used to collect the data about the person and send the information using wireless technology. This method reduces the health care cost of patients. A wireless sensor network consists of many nodes equipped with a sensing unit, memory, microcontroller (microprocessor), wireless communication interface and power source. WSNs can be deployed in an ad-hoc manner which make them robust, fault tolerance, and increase in spatial coverage. They can greatly be used to monitor and track conditions of patients in both cities and rural areas using an intranet or internet thereby reducing the stress and strain of healthcare providers, eliminate medical errors, reduce workload and increase efficiency of hospital staff, reduce long-term cost of healthcare services, and improve the comfort of the patients. Therefore, providing guaranteed, secured, and low transmission latency. The sensor nodes are being operated by batteries, their power consumption during transmission must be minimal for efficient and reliable data transmission between WBAN and personal server. Using sensor nodes with communication technologies such as mobile phones, General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), 3G, and the internet, the sensor network can keep patient, caregivers, and doctor informed while also establishing trends and detecting variations in health. The proposed system is to monitoring the patients continuously from remote areas using wearable sensors. This system consists of many sensors such as temperature, pressure, heart beat, and accelerometer. The data are collected by the sensors is calculated and analysed using microcontroller. Based on the predefined values it compares and displays the information about the patients.