Transmission of Emergency Messages in Wireless Patient Monitoring: Routing and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Patient monitoring is becoming a requirement for offering a better healthcare to an increasing number of patients in nursing homes and hospitals. During the monitoring, vital signs of patients could fluctuate significantly and/or match certain undesirable patterns and therefore "alerts" or emergency messages must be delivered to healthcare professionals. There has been some work in using infrastructure-oriented wireless networks for transmission of emergency messages, however, the network coverage and reliability of message delivery have not been satisfactory. To overcome these, we propose that ad hoc networks can be formed among patients' devices for improved transmission of emergency messages. We also propose several design enhancements to improve the quality and coverage of patient monitoring. The performance results for the proposed ad hoc network based architecture show that reliable message delivery and low monitoring delays can be achieved by using multicast or broadcast-based routing schemes..

Addressing Un-cooperation of Routers in Wireless Patient Monitoring

“…In simple terms, the probability of message reception is the probability that a route can be found to a destination user. As shown in [12], the maximum number of routes is:…”

“…First, we attempt to derive the probability of finding a nearby user (device), which will be influenced by individual device distribution function (D E ), total area, number of users, device range, mobility level, obstacles, interference, and co-relation between user locations where users are together in a room/location for some reason [12]. The next-hop device probability can be approximated as…”

“…We utilize an analytical model to derive the performance in terms of delivery of messages under un-cooperative and/or failed routers. The model employs probability of finding other devices in different routing schemes to estimate the end-to-end reliability of message delivery [12]. The impact of un-cooperative and/or failed nodes (as shown in Figure 1) is measured by the number of devices available for routing.…”

Real-Time Individuation of Global Unsafe Anomalies and Alarm Activation

“…In this way, data are transmitted only when unsafe situations occur and data compression is not strictly required. In [16] the authors concentrate on improving transmission of emergency messages, which must be reliably delivered to healthcare professionals with minimal delays and message corruption. They propose a network solution for emergency signal transmission using ad hoc wireless networks, which can be formed among patient-worn devices.…”