A MOBILE-CARE SYSTEM OVER WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK FOR HOME HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS

In response to the home healthcare requirement of chronic patients, this paper proposes a mobile-care system integrated with a variety of vital-sign monitorings, where all the front-end vital-sign measuring devices are portable and have the ability of short-range wireless communication. In order to make the system suitable for home applications, wireless sensor network is introduced to transmit the captured vital signs to the residential gateway by means of multi-hop relay. Then the residential gateway uploads data to the care server via internet to carry out patient's condition monitoring and the management of pathological data. Furthermore, the system is equipped with the alarm mechanism, where the portable care device is able to immediately perceive the critical condition of the patient and send a warning message to medical and nursing personnels to achieve the goal of prompt rescue.