Interaction of Patients with Breathing Problems through NFC in Ambient Assisted Living Environments

Near Field Communication (NFC) is one of the technologies, in conjunction with Bluetooth and 6LoWPAN, which makes feasible the wireless transmission of information from small objects and sensors to Internet-enabled devices. This presents a new technological generation, denominated Internet of Things (IoT), which is able to integrate in Internet the sensors and objects located surround us. Our research work is focused on the evaluation of the capabilities from the mentioned technologies for the integration of a continuous data transmission model. Specifically, this paper analyzes the capabilities for transmitting continuous data from NFC. This presents special considerations and constrains, since it was not originally designed for this purpose. Specifically, it has been considered, for this evaluation, a sensor with high requirements in data transmission, an electrocardiogram (ECG). Over this sensor is presented an evaluation of the performance with the native communication model from the sensor, i.e. sending via NFC all the collected data, concluding that it is necessary to perform data compression when the amount of data to send is too large, since this introduces a delay of 2 bytes for each 127 bytes. Therefore, this work also presents a solution of pre-processed and data compression to make feasible the communication with NFC technology.