Biomedical Application of Wireless Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

We study a typical heterogeneous network, a Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network (WBSN), as it consists of various types of biosensors to monitor different physiological parameters. WBSN will help to enhance medical services with its unique advantages in long-term monitoring, easy network deployment, wireless connections, and ambulatory capabilities. The network protocol plays an important role in carrying out the medical and healthcare services. Many unique challenges exist in WBSN design for medical and healthcare services, including extensive optimization problems in network protocol design to deal with power scheduling and radiation absorption concerns. Concerning these issues, we present a systematic solution to the wireless biomedical sensor network in our project named MediMesh. We develop a prototypical test-bed for medical and healthcare applications and evaluate the radiation absorption effects and efficiency. A lightweight network protocol is proposed, taking into consideration of the radiation absorption effects and communication overhead. After data acquisition from the sink stations, a data publishing system based on web service technology is implemented for typical medical and healthcare monitoring services in a hospital or home environment.