A wireless sensor node for long-term monitoring in life science applications

A general-purpose wireless sensor node for secure long-term monitoring of signals in life science applications is presented to enable remote patient monitoring and to facilitate research in areas such as preventative medicine. The system connects to a retail smartphone using the low-energy ANT protocol. It is composed of state-of-the-art low-energy hardware and uses delta encoding and Huffman encoding for data compression. Dynamic message rate control is applied to realize energy savings by optimization of the ANT channels message rate. Sensitive medical information is encrypted with the Hummingbird2 cipher. Experimental results show the reliability of the ANT interface and the energy efficiency of the Hummingbird2 cipher.