Application of wireless sensor networks to healthcare promotion

• Author(s): Neves, Paulo ; Stachyra, Michal ; Rodrigues, Joel
• Date: 2008
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.11/548
• Origin: Repositório Científico do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco
• Subject(s): Wireless sensor networks; Healthcare; Body sensor networks; M-health; Biofeedback; Smart biosensor
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Born on military applications, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) application grew on the promise of environment sensing and data processing capability at low cost. These networks can hold hundreds or even thousands of smart sensing nodes with processing and sensing capabilities and even integrated power through a dedicated battery. This paper surveys on the application of wireless sensor networks to healthcare promotion, namely with the use of biosensor technology applied to body sensor networks. On a wireless body sensor network, a person wears biosensors to gather data, while doing their daily activities. Currently, engineers and medical staff are cooperating on finding new ways to properly gather meaningful data on-site and achieve a convenient way to process these data for research and on-site medical decision. New challenges that such approach brings are also considered. Moreover, it is shown that wireless sensor networks provide the technology to built wireless sensing and create a convenient infrastructure for multiple data gathering in healthcare applications. Together with real successful examples, we demonstrate the great usefulness of wireless sensor networks in healthcare promotion. The paper concludes with some guidelines for future work.