Wireless Sensor Grid Architecture for Monitoring Different Groups of Patients‟ Health Status Using ALCHEMI Toolkit

Abstract

In recent days, some severe diseases and disorders need close and continual monitoring in order to prevent further damage and/or death. The urgent problem in society today is the increase of patients recovering from surgery, the elderly population with a shortage of caregivers and ambulatory patients‟ status. The existing patient-monitoring systems are designed to be used by highly trained operators, with a number of hampering wires from the sensors to the data acquisition system; thus, such instruments are hardly suitable for monitoring during the patients‟ routine activities. This problem must be solved in a way, which is acceptable from a patient‟s perspective, and at the same time increase the efficiency of the personnel working in healthcare centers during the patients‟ routine activities. One of the primary challenges faced by healthcare authorities is to maximize the quality and breadth of healthcare services while controlling the costs. One possible solution is the use of modern information and communication technology to enable the healthcare personnel to work more efficiently. A trend in modern medicine is the tendency towards individualization of healthcare and, potentially, grid computing can play an important role by allowing the sharing of resources and expertise to improve the quality of healthcare. The wireless sensor grid architecture proposed for monitoring post-operative patients in hospitals, elderly patients at home and patients affected by COPD and PD in an ambulatory environment, provides a platform for physicians and researchers to share information with a distributed database and computational resources to facilitate analysis and diagnosis. The data acquired from heterogeneous sources are stored in a medical server to perform complex on-line and off-line analysis, and prediction with the information databases, and alert the physicians, emergency departments and caretakers. Authenticated users can access the patient‟s information through a secured web server.