ZigBee Healthcare Monitoring System for ambient assisted living environments

Abstract

Healthcare Monitoring Systems (HMSs) use Wireless Sensor Networks to monitor patients in hospitals and elderly people living in Ambient Assisted Living environments. HMSs assist in monitoring chronic diseases such as Heart Attacks, High Blood Pressure and other cardiovascular diseases using Wireless Local Area Network such as ZigBee/802.15.4. Wearable and implanted devices are types of Body sensors that collect human health related data and transmit it over Personal Area Networks (PANs) such as ZigBee. However, PANs are facing the challenge of increasing network traffic due to the increased number of IP-enabled devices connected in Healthcare Monitoring Systems to assist patients. ZigBee technology is an IEEE 802.15.4 standard designed to address network traffic issues in PANs. To route traffic, ZigBee network use ZigBee Tree Routing (ZTR) protocol and Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV). ZTR however suffers a challenge of network latency caused by end to end delay during packet forwarding. This paper is proposing a New Tree Routing Protocol (NTRP) for Healthcare Monitoring Systems to collect Heart Rate data signals from a human's body. NTRP uses Kruskal's minimum spanning tree to find shortest routes on a ZigBee network which improves ZTR. Neighbor tables are implemented in NTRP instead of parent-child mechanism implemented in ZTR. To reduce end to end delay, NTRP groups' nodes into clusters and the cluster heads use neighbor tables to forward heart rate data to the destination node. NS-2 simulation tool is used to evaluate NTRP performance.