A Sensor Network Architecture for Cardiac Health Monitoring

Wireless telemedicine and m-health: technologies, applications and research issues

“…In designing wearable medical sensor applications, such as a biosensor shirt (Liszka, 2007), it is required to take three levels of design framework into consideration, namely the Communication Policy (level 0), Sensing Modalities (level 1) and Diagnostic Profile (level 2).…”

“…The base level is called the Communication Policy level (for bandwidth, data rate, coverage, power, etc. ), and it is mainly concerned with the hardware and related software configuration (Liszka, 2007). For example, this level will establish the optimal bandwidth and computing power of medical sensors to achieve low battery consumption.…”

“…At the same time, some hardware characteristics should remain flexible. For instance, alerting users of low battery or medical emergencies should preferably be employed at the hardware level (Liszka, 2007). The second level, the Sensing Modalities level (for 3D geometry, measurements, scheduling, algorithms, etc.)…”

“…is concerned with the system architecture from the engineering perspective. At this level, one problematic issue will be to consider proper places to put biomedical sensors regardless of human movements, such as reaching, turning or bending down (Liszka, 2007). This placement strategy will largely influence the quality of the physiological data collection.…”

“…Data sizes are also considered according to what kind of medical data sampling is applied. For example, two integers will be enough for sampling blood pressure, but millivolts and microvolts will be additionally required for ECG (Liszka, 2007). Likewise, an amount of local storage and a protocol used for communicating with other sensors are considered at this level.…”