An ad hoc wireless sensor network for telemedicine applications

Recent advances in embedded computing systems have led to the emergence of wireless sensor networks (SNETs), consisting of small, battery-powered "motes" with limited computation and radio communication capabilities. SNETs permit data gathering and computation to be deeply embedded in the physical environment. Large-scale ad hoc sensor networks (ASNET), when deployed among mobile patients, can provide dynamic data query architecture to allow medical specialists to monitor patients at any place via the web or cellular network. In case of an emergency, doctors and/or nurses will be contacted automatically through their handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) or cellular phones. In specific, the proposed network consists of sensor nodes at the first layer whose responsibility is to measure, collect and communicate, via wired or wireless interface, readings to a microcontroller representing the second layer of the architecture. Deployed microcontrollers process incoming readings and report to a central system via a wireless interface. The implemented network distinguishes between periodic sensor readings and critical or event driven readings where higher priority is given for the latter. In this paper we implement 3 special cases for tracking and monitoring patients and doctors using SNETs. In addition, the performance of a large scale of our implementation has been tested by means of mathematical analysis.