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Wearable physiological monitoring system consists of an array of sensors embedded into the fabric of the wearer to continuously monitor the physiological parameters and transmit wireless to a remote monitoring station. At the remote monitoring station the data is correlated to study the overall health status of the wearer. In the conventional wearable physiological monitoring system, the sensors are integrated at specific locations on the vest and are interconnected to the wearable data acquisition hardware by wires woven into the fabric. The drawbacks associated with these systems are the cables woven in the fabric pickup noise such as power line interference and signals from nearby radiating sources and thereby corrupting the physiological signals. Also repositioning the sensors in the fabric is difficult once integrated. The problems can be overcome by the use of physiological sensors with miniaturized electronics to condition, process, digitize and wireless transmission integrated into the single module. These sensors are strategically placed at various locations on the vest. Number of sensors integrated into the fabric form a network (Personal Area Network) and interacts with the human system to acquire and transmit the physiological data to a wearable data acquisition system. The wearable data acquisition hardware collects the data from various sensors and transmits the processed data to the remote monitoring station. The paper discusses wireless sensor network and its application to wearable physiological monitoring and its applications. Also the problems associated with conventional wearable physiological monitoring are discussed.

Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications technology to provide medical information and services. It may be as simple as two health professionals discussing a case over the telephone, or as sophisticated as using satellite technology to broadcast a consultation between providers at facilities in two countries, using videoconferencing equipment. The first is used daily by most health professionals, and the latter is used by the military and some large medical centers. In the past, several telemedicine applications using wired communications were presented. The recent evolutions of wireless communications have enabled telemedicine systems to operate throughout the world, hence expanding telemedicine benefits, applications, and services. In telemedicine, typically scenarios is two doctors are involved with the patient: a local attending doctor and a remote tele-doctor who is engaged to do one or more of a variety of services ranging from tele-consultation, or performing a tele-surgery, as well as tele-diagnosis where a doctor tele-diagnoses a sickness. The telemedicine systems need to be very simple to operate, reliable and consistent links, use standard communication protocols, and efficient bandwidth. The current generation of the telemedicine systems uses the store-and-forward approach of telemedicine, where medical data are acquired and compiled and transmitted. A high quality video and audio is required at both the sides to enable the consulting doctor and patients to have face-to-face encounter with the expert doctor. In this paper we discuss a prototype wireless Internet Protocol (IP) based store and forward telemedicine system using the Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) satellite communication and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN).

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