Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 54, Issue 15, 28 October 2010, Pages 2688-2710
Computer Networks

Wireless sensor networks for healthcare: A survey

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2010.05.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Becoming mature enough to be used for improving the quality of life, wireless sensor network technologies are considered as one of the key research areas in computer science and healthcare application industries. The pervasive healthcare systems provide rich contextual information and alerting mechanisms against odd conditions with continuous monitoring. This minimizes the need for caregivers and helps the chronically ill and elderly to survive an independent life, besides provides quality care for the babies and little children whose both parents have to work. Although having significant benefits, the area has still major challenges which are investigated in this paper. We provide several state of the art examples together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provide a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and challenges of these systems.

Introduction

Wireless sensor network technologies have the potential to change the way of living with many applications in entertainment, travel, retail, industry, medicine, care of the dependent people, and emergency management and many other areas. Wireless sensors and sensor networks, pervasive computing, and artificial intelligence research together have built the interdisciplinary concept of ambient intelligence (AmI) in order to overcome the challenges we face in everyday life [1]. One of the major challenges of the world for the last decades has been the continuous elderly population increase in the developed countries. Population Reference Bureau [2] forecasts that in the next 20 years, the 65-and-over population in the developed countries will be nearly 20% of the overall population. Hence the need of delivering quality care to a rapidly growing population of elderly while reducing the healthcare costs is an important issue. One promising application in that area is the integration of sensing and consumer electronics technologies which would allow people to be constantly monitored [3]. In-home pervasive networks may assist residents and their caregivers by providing continuous medical monitoring, memory enhancement, control of home appliances, medical data access, and emergency communication [4], [5]. Constant monitoring will increase early detection of emergency conditions and diseases for at risk patients and also provide wide range of healthcare services for people with various degrees of cognitive and physical disabilities [6]. Not only the elderly and chronically ill but also the families in which both parents have to work will derive benefit from these systems for delivering high-quality care services for their babies and little children.

Researchers in computer, networking, and medical fields are working together in order to make the broad vision of smart healthcare possible. The importance of integrating large-scale wireless telecommunication technologies such as 3G, Wi-Fi Mesh, and WiMAX, with telemedicine has already been addressed by some researchers. Further improvements will be achieved by the coexistence of small-scale personal area technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth, ZigBee, and wireless sensor networks, together with large-scale wireless networks to provide context-aware applications [7]. Besides providing pervasiveness with existing and relatively more mature wireless network technologies, the development of unobtrusive small sensor devices enabling not only accurate information but also reliable data delivery is of great importance. Moreover, the glue combining all these technologies is the application, which is the coordinator between the caregivers and the caretakers and between the sensor devices and all of the actors in the overall system cycle. Since the application is the core of the high-quality healthcare service concept, the need for intelligent, context-aware healthcare applications will be increased.

Given the importance of the subject, there are already several applications and prototypes on the subject. For example, some of them are devoted to continuous monitoring for cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or similar cognitive diseases. Some focus on fall detection, posture detection and location tracking and others make use of biological and environmental sensors to identify patients’ health status. There is also significant research effort in developing tiny wireless sensor devices, preferably integrated into fabric or other substances and be implanted in human body.

There are other survey studies in the literature [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. However, these studies have either only smart home perspective or limited information about the design issues and challenges. In this survey, we evaluate the state of the art research activities and present issues that need to be addressed to enhance the quality of life for the elderly, children and chronically ill people. We provide survey of the recent research on future intelligent monitoring applications not only from a smart home perspective but rather from a more healthcare related perspective. We also discuss benefits that will be achieved and challenges that will be faced while designing the future healthcare applications.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the design issues for healthcare monitoring systems using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and discusses benefits of these systems. Section 3 describes several applications and prototypes. Section 4 discusses challenges of healthcare monitoring solutions using WSNs and addresses open research problems on the subject. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper.

Section snippets

Benefits and design considerations for healthcare monitoring systems

The medical applications of wireless sensor networks aim to improve the existing healthcare and monitoring services especially for the elderly, children and chronically ill. There are several benefits achieved with these systems. To begin with, remote monitoring capability is the main benefit of pervasive healthcare systems. With remote monitoring, the identification of emergency conditions for at risk patients will become easy and the people with different degrees of cognitive and physical

Healthcare monitoring applications and wireless sensor network prototypes

There are several prototype and commercial applications for pervasive healthcare monitoring for the elderly, children and chronically ill people. When these applications are explored, it is observed that the main focus categories include (i) activities of daily living monitoring, (ii) fall and movement detection, (iii) location tracking, (iv) medication intake monitoring, and (v) medical status monitoring. In the first category, the applications try to identify and differentiate everyday

Challenges and open research problems of the WSN solutions for healthcare

In this section, we present the challenges observed while designing pervasive healthcare systems and state the open research problems of the surveyed systems. There are numerous challenges of wireless sensor networks in all layers. In this survey, we approach these challenges with a healthcare specific perspective. The stated challenges are selected must be studied for fully enjoying the benefits of pervasive healthcare systems using wireless sensor networks.

Conclusions

Given the importance of addressing ways to provide smart healthcare for the elderly, chronically ill and children, researchers have started to explore technological solutions to enhance health and social care provision in a way which complements existing services. In this study, we have evaluated the examples of how people could benefit from living in homes that have wireless sensor technologies for improved quality of life and outlined issues to keep in mind during their development. We have

Acknowledgement

This research is supported by Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under the Grant No. 108E207 and also supported by B.U. Research Fund under the Grant No. 5146.

Hande Alemdar received his B.S. (with honors) and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Bogˇaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. degree. She is also a research and teaching assistant in the Bogˇaziçi University Computer Engineering Department. She worked as a software engineer from 2004 to 2008. Her research interests include the areas of RFID technologies, wireless communications, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

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    Hande Alemdar received his B.S. (with honors) and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Bogˇaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. degree. She is also a research and teaching assistant in the Bogˇaziçi University Computer Engineering Department. She worked as a software engineer from 2004 to 2008. Her research interests include the areas of RFID technologies, wireless communications, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

    Cem Ersoy received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Bogˇaziçi University in 1984 and 1986, respectively. He worked as an R&D Engineer at NETAS A.S. between 1984 and 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York, in 1992. Currently, he is a professor in the Computer Engineering Department of Bogˇaziçi University. His research interests include performance evaluation of communication networks, wireless sensor networks, and mobile applications. He is the chairman of the IEEE Communications Society Turkish Chapter.

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