WSN4QoL: A WSN-Oriented Healthcare System Architecture

Abstract

People worldwide are getting older and this fact has pushed the need for designing new, more pervasive, and possibly cost effective healthcare systems. In this field, distributed and networked embedded systems, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), are the most appealing technology to achieve continuous monitoring of aged people for their own safety, without affecting their daily activities. This paper proposes recent advancements in this field by introducing WSN4QoL, a Marie Curie project which involves academic and industrial partners from three EU countries. The project aims to propose new WSN-based technologies to meet the specific requirements of pervasive healthcare applications. In particular, in this paper, the system architecture is presented to cope with the challenges imposed by the specific application scenario. This includes a network coding (NC) mechanism and a distributed localization solution that have been implemented on WSN testbeds to achieve efficiency in the communications and to enable indoor people tracking. Preliminary results in a real environment show good system performance that meet our expectations.

A residential maintenance-free long-term activity monitoring system for healthcare applications

“…The research community has also proposed and used several wearable devices for activity monitoring systems and AAL healthcare architectures, such as [10] and [11], a few of which are briefly reviewed in this section. We refer the reader to [6] for an exhaustive survey on smart wearable technologies.…”

BSNCare+: A Robust IoT-Oriented Healthcare System with Non-Repudiation Transactions

“…In 2014, Tennina et al [5] introduced a healthcare system architecture, which is fit for wireless sensor networks. The authors proposed a communication protocol stack for WSN (wireless sensor networks)-based pervasive healthcare applications in which four layers embedded with various technologies, such as IEEE 802.15.4 MAC (medium access control) layer, network layer, middleware services and application layer, are introduced.…”

An efficient MAC-based scheme against pollution attacks in XOR network coding-enabled WBANs for remote patient monitoring systems

“…However, WBANs comprise a subset of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and thus, they inherit the limitations of WSNs in terms of communication bandwidth, reliability, and power consumption that should be addressed so that WBANs can reach their full potential [3,[11][12][13][14]. In this sense, the application of network coding (NC) technology in WBANs has emerged as a promising solution to address these limitations, since it provides significant benefits including network capacity improvement, robustness to packet losses, and lower energy consumption [15][16][17][18].…”