A device search strategy based on connections history for patient monitoring

Abstract

Ambient Assisted Living provides support for people's daily life and aims at improving their quality of life. A health monitoring service could be intended to address the needs of sick people. Patient monitoring by medical personnel is frequently supported by handheld devices receiving health-care information. Location of these mobile devices is necessary in order to communicate any information, and the search strategy to locate them becomes a challenging issue in comparison to networks with permanent connections. We address this problem from an application point of view considering a membership based communication system characterized by users following repetitive patrol patterns day after day. We identify these patterns to generate a history of network connections to decrease the time required to locate any device on the network. We propose a modification of the commonly used Random Walk strategy to setup new connections on ad-hoc networks taking advantage of the learned patrol patterns. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.