Cognitive Sensor Networks implementation in medical environmental surveillance

Abstract

Wireless communication services, including Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), emerge in healthcare environments with a variety of e-health applications collecting medical data and patient information. Possible WSN ambient surveillance in hospitals (which is of secondary importance) must consider the coexistence challenges with the wireless technologies that collect the medical data and minimize the impact towards the medical devices that operate in the same frequency band. To mitigate the interference problems WSNs may efficiently utilize the dynamic spectrum access techniques introduced by the cognitive radio (CR). This paper presents a proof-of-concept for CR enabled wireless sensor network deployed in medical surroundings. The proof-of-concept is performed on a Sun SPOT testbed platform. It demonstrates the WSNs ability to dynamically adjust the transmission parameters (i.e. frequency) thus minimizing the interference to the wireless systems of primary importance in the hospital environments.