The objective of this project is the utilization of autonomous wireless sensors for patient monitoring in hospital as well as at home.
In sensor-based medical applications, patients are continuously being monitored by means of small sensor nodes attached to their body. Such a network is referred to as a body area network. Furthermore, other sensors might be placed throughout the site, for example a hospital. Such a network is referred to as an ambient sensor network. The two networks collaborate to form a WSN to relay data from and to patients. In such a network, two different typologies of nodes can be identified: (1) Body-networks sensor nodes (BS) located on the patients to collect information about their body condition; (2) Ambient-sensor nodes (AS) dispersed in the environment to collect further environment information as well as to forward useful data from and to a doctor.
Within this context, the use of Zigbee has shown a number of issues that could compromise the application feasibility. In addition, any change in the stack would compromise the Zigbee compliancy. A natural solution is to base the system on the IEEE802.15.4 one-hop communication and build ad-hoc middleware capability.
The aim of this project is to provide middleware capability for sensors equipped with IEEE802.15.4 (MAC+Phy ) communication according to sensor-based medical applications. Some of the activities envisaged will include:
1. Testing the performance of an existing tree-based routing algorithm for packets being transmitted from/to node to/from gateway in a multihop fashion;
2. Design a flexible mechanism to collect data from the patient, e.g. by Pub/sub paradigm;
3. Design an application tool such as a GUI (Graphical User Interface) that takes data coming from the serial port and display them on the web.
For postgraduates, please send a brief email and CV to:
ruzzelli[at]ucd[dot]ie
© 2006 PRISM Laboratory