A wireless medical monitoring over a heterogeneous sensor network

This paper presents a heterogeneous sensor network system that has the capability to monitor physiological parameters from multiple patient bodies by means of different communication standards. The system uses the recently opened medical band called MICS (medical implant communication service) between the sensor nodes and a remote central control unit (CCU) that behaves as a base station. The CCU communicates with another network standard (the Internet or a mobile network) for a long distance data transfer. The proposed system offers mobility to patients and flexibility to medical staff to obtain patient's physiological data on demand basis via Internet. A prototype sensor network including hardware, firmware and software designs has been implemented and tested by incorporating temperature and pulse rate sensors on nodes. The developed system has been optimized for power consumption by having the nodes sleep when there is no communication via a bidirectional communication.