A Maintenance-free Wireless Sensor Network Based System for AAL Applications

Inhalt:
In our aging society, taking care of the elderly and sick people is a very important and difficult task. In most cases, the problems involved with providing proper medical and personal surveillance are not solvable, and when they are, the solutions are usually not cost effective. Automated monitoring systems can be used to recognize certain diseases or many other critical conditions. By identifying the activities of daily life (ADLs), we can detect unusual events, critical situations and trends. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used to measure the parameters of an individual and the immediate environment. In an ideal monitoring system, sensors must be invisible, wearable and must require minimal maintenance. One of the goals of our development is to use standard and suitable sensors. We use maintenance-free sensors, which are currently available in the market. We integrated these sensors into our patient monitoring system, which contains various other sensors, to recognize the ADLs in a novel, more effective and reliable way. A general sensor profile configuration is used to ensure the scalability of our maintenance-free sensor network subsystem.