Remote Patient Monitoring and MANET: Applications and Challenges

Abstract

In the recent years, we have seen a rapid advancement in the field of mobile computing due to the rapid increase in the no. of inexpensive, widely available wireless devices. However, modern devices, applications and protocols solely focuses on cellular or wireless local area networks (WLANs), not taking into account the great potential offered by mobile ad hoc networking.. Apart from conventional SMS and voice calling, the mobile technology has found tremendous applications in various departments such as military services, healthcare services, etc. In this paper, we have discussed a prototype of a wireless patient monitoring system for the management of cardiac predicament and also compared its implication in ad hoc network environment. This is because it is not always practical to maintain wireless mobile communication in remote areas and hilly terrains and these places usually lack good doctors and proper health care facilities to treat various diseases. This problem has been addressed in this paper by the design and implementation of an Ad hoc sensor network based solution. The proposed technique is intended specifically for remote rural areas where the infrastructural facilities such as the internet, GSM/GPRS etc are not available. There are various health parameters like pulse rate, temperature etc. through which patients can be monitored. The work can be categorised into three stages of data acquisition, data processing and data communication stages. A data acquisition stage consists of sensors to monitor the temperature and pulse rate. The sensor outputs are converted to digital form and read by a basic atmega16 microcontroller which does some processing and is sent through the serial port to the data processing software. In data processing module critical values of the measured data can be set; exceeding which the processer will initiate the communication unit to send SMS to the predefined mobile numbers via GSM module. When any deviation from the normal behaviour is detected or the received parameters of the patient goes beyond the threshold limit, the processing unit automatically transmits therelevant data to the receiver’s device as a SMS via a GSM module and at the same time the buzzer starts ringing.
DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.1506160