Medical Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks: Who-Did-What - Application and Multidisciplinary Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks - page 169

Software

Software for the UbiMon architecture can be organized into five different modules.
This categorization is based upon the existing hardware elements. Modules, which
can be listed, are:

• BSN node software module

• LPU software module

• CS software module

• Patient database (PD)

• WS software module

The first module for the BSN node is TinyOS-based piece of software. It samples
the sensor data and transfers them to local processing unit. High rate requirements
of the sensor signals (ECG) resulted in TinyOS protocol and radio stack replacement
with a lightweight protocol with special time division multiple access (TDMA).
LPU software communicates to BSN node via serial interface of the base station
(MICA2 dot) to gather sensor data. The module is also responsible for displaying
the gathered data and recognizing the patients' activities. Recognition is done based
on the gathered context-aware sensor data. Another important software tool is
WIFI/Bluetooth-based data transfer to central server.
CS module receives the data and stores them into patient database. This enables
later purchasing of the patient clinical records, in any way.
WS software includes retrieval and proper representation of patients' data. Data
retrieval is done over data extraction from database. Later, data are presented to
clinicians through appropriate graphical user interface. This enables clinicians to
perform successful patient management.

Contribution

The UbiMon system, besides continuous patients' monitoring in their natural envi-
ronment, provides the architecture for collection, gathering, and analyzing data
from a number of biosensors (wearable or implantable). Another significant aspect
provided with this architecture is the context awareness which enables the capturing
of any clinical relevant episode.

8.4.3.2 Satire

Satire (software architecture for smart attire) is a wearable personal monitoring service,
developed through cooperation between University of Illinois and University of
Virginia. It allows users to maintain a private searchable record of their daily activities
as measured by motion and location sensors, which are two of the most popular sens-
ing modalities in personal instrumentation [ 3 ]. The main idea is to deploy nonobtrusive
wearable monitoring platform for data sensing, local storage, and occasional upload in
order to satisfy medical, safety, personal, or entertainment reasons.