A heterogeneous network management approach to wireless sensor networks in personal healthcare environments
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2008
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Many countries are facing problems caused by a rapid surge in
numbers of people over sixty-five. This aging population cohort will
place a strain on the existing health systems because the elderly are
prone to falls, chronic illnesses, dementia and general frailty. At the
same time governments are struggling to attract more people into the
health systems and there are already shortages of qualified nurses and
care givers.
This thesis represents a multi disciplinary approach to trying to solve
some of the above issues. In the first instance the researcher has
established the validity of the health crisis and then examined ways in
which Information Technology could help to alleviate some of the
issues. The nascent technology called Wireless Sensor Networks was
examined as a way of providing remote health monitoring for the
elderly, the infirm and the ill. The researcher postulated that Network
Management models and tools that are used to monitor huge networks
of computers could be adapted to monitor the health of persons in
their own homes, in aged care facilities and hospitals.
Wireless Sensor Network (WNS) Personal Healthcare can monitor such
vital signs as a patient’s temperature, heart rate and blood oxygen
level. WSNs (often referred to as Motes) use wireless transceivers that
can do remote sensing. The researcher aimed to assist all stakeholders
in the personal healthcare arena to use WSNs to improve monitoring.
The researcher provided a solution architecture and framework for
healthcare sensor monitoring systems, based on network management
techniques. This architecture generalises to heterogeneous and
autonomous data acquisition systems.
Future directions from this research point towards new areas of
knowledge from the development or creation of new technologies to
support the exponential growth of ubiquitous, just-in-time WSN health
informational services and applications such as the preventive and
proactive personal care health management and services around it.
The affordable and ubiquitous distributed access to remote personal
health care technologies in the future could have an important impact
in the society, by allowing the individuals to take immediate preventive
actions over their overall health condition. These systems could
potentially prevent death as well as improve national health budgets
by limiting costly medical interventions that could have been avoided
by individual, easy-action early prevention.
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