Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1
Remote monitoring system
that will tightly interact with the physical environment in a ubiquitous and perva-
sive fashion [
1
]. The technology has several potential applications in the medical
industry. In particular, the ability to remotely monitor patient vital signs in real time
from a centralized location is a growing area of interest. Interest in WSNs is fueled
by the fact that the nodes are cost effective, compact, and can be energy efficient.
Alternatives include WiFi and Bluetooth, which are focused on applications
that normally require higher bandwidth. This chapter describes a system using
Crossbow 2.4 GHz MICAz wireless sensor nodes [
2
], a commercial blood pres-
sure monitor (BPM), and an internally developed Graphical User Interface (GUI)
to design a prototype system that can monitor vital signs from a large number of
patients simultaneously.
Description
A conceptual view of the system is shown in Fig.
1
. Each patient is connected to a
remote monitoring system, which allows the medical staff to track the patient's
vital signs and transmit the readings wirelessly from the patient through a fixed
infrastructure of routing nodes to the base station. Depending on the patient's
distance from the base station, messages can pass through multiple router nodes to
reach the base station. The base station is connected to a host computer running a
Java-based GUI to interpret and display the data.
The three main areas of the system interface are sensor to BPM, sensor base
station to host computer, and the human interface to the host computer (via GUI).
Sensor to Blood Pressure Monitor Interface
A commercially available A&D UA-767PC BPM is used to provide sensor readings
for the system. The BPM takes simultaneous blood pressure measurements. It
includes a serial port connection that facilitates bi-directional communication at
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