Testbed design for Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network (WBSN) application

In wireless sensor network (WSN), a collection of nodes interacts with each other to gather information from the surveillance area. Some of the applications that WSN are currently being used are habitat monitoring, health care system and building automation, to name a few. Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network (WBSN) allows capturing of physiological signals, continuous monitoring and updating of a patient's medical status remotely. This paper focuses on the development of a wireless sensor node testbed for WBSN application which complies with IEEE 802.15.4 standard and operates in 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) band. The initial state of WBSN development is the design of the wireless sensor node called TelG. The main features of TelG include low power consumption, wearable, flexible and small size. It is then embedded with a self-built operating system called WiseOS to support customized operations. A pulse oximeter is then integrated with TelG for the purpose of experimentation. The testbed performance is analyzed in terms of packet reception rate (PRR) and end-to-end delay. The results exhibit a decrease in PRR as distance increases and increasing network delay with increasing number of hops. It is also observed that received signal using the testbed is satisfactory for distances less than 10 meters per hop.