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Patient vital sign monitoring within hospitals requires the use of non-invasive sensors that are hardwired to bedside monitors. This set-up is cumbersome, forcing the patient to be confined to his hospital bed thereby not allowing him to move around freely within the hospital premises. This paper addresses the use of wireless sensor networks for monitoring patient vital sign data in a hospital setting. Crossbow MICAz motes have been used to design a robust mesh network that routes patient data to a remote base station within the hospital premises. A hospital care giver can have access to this data at any point in time and doesn't have to be physically present in the patient's room to review the readings. The network infrastructure nodes are self-powered and draw energy from overhead 34W fluorescent lights via solar panels. The sensor nodes can be interfaced to a variety of vital sign sensors such as electrocardiograms (ECGs), pulse-oximeters and blood pressure (BP) sensors. In order to verify a completely functioning system, a commercial BP/heart-rate monitor (BPM) was interfaced to a wireless sensor node. The sensor node controls the BPM to initiate a reading, then collects the data and forwards it to the base station. An attractive graphical user interface (GUI) was designed to store and display patient data on the base station PC. The set-up was found to be extremely robust with low power consumption.

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Life-saving medical implants like pacemakers and defibrillators face a big drawback that their batteries eventually run out and patients require frequent surgery to have these batteries replaced. With the advent of technology, alternatives can be provided for such surgeries. To power these devices, body energy harvesting techniques may be employed. Some of the power sources are patient's heartbeat, blood flow inside the vessels, movement of the body parts, and the body temperature (heat). Different types of sensors are employed, such as for sensing the energy from the heartbeat the piezoelectric and semiconducting coupled nanowires are used that convert the mechanical energy into electricity. Similarly, for sensing the blood flow energy, nanogenerators driven by ultrasonic waves are used that have the ability to directly convert the hydraulic energy in human body to electrical energy. Another consideration is to use body heat employing biothermal battery to generate electricity using multiple arrays of thermoelectric generators built into an implantable chip. These generators exploit the well-known thermocouple effect. For the biothermal device to work, it needs a 2°C temperature difference across it. But there are many parts of the body where a temperature difference of 5°C exists – typically in the few millimeters just below the skin, where it is planned to place this device. This study focuses on using body heat as an alternative energy source to recharge pacemaker batteries and other medical devices and prevent the possibility of life-risk during repeated surgery.

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