Implementation of a Cyber-Physical System Using Wireless Sensor Networks for Monitoring Patients

Sensing, distributed computation and wireless communication are the essential building components of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). Having many advantages such as mobility, low power, multi-hop routing, low latency, self-administration, autonomous data acquisition, and fault tolerance, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gone beyond the scope of monitoring the environment and can be a way to support CPS. This paper presents the design, deployment, and empirical study of an eHealth system, which can remotely monitor vital signs from patients such as body temperature, blood pressure, SPO2, and heart rate. The primary contribution of this paper is the measurements of the proposed eHealth device that assesses the feasibility of WSNs for patient monitoring in hospitals in two aspects of communication and clinical sensing. Moreover, both simulation and experiment are used to investigate the performance of the design in many aspects such as networking reliability, sensing reliability, or end-to-end delay. The results show that the network achieved high reliability nearly 97% while the sensing reliability of the vital signs can be obtained at approximately 98%. This indicates the feasibility and promise of using WSNs for continuous patient monitoring and clinical worsening detection in general hospital units.