Pervasive sensing system for healthcare

Abstract

The increasing aging population imposed a great challenge in the healthcare facilities. As these elderly need more intensive care, the call for physical monitoring from the caregivers is required. This problem can be alleviated by using a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) sensing system for remote, continuous, automated, and unobtrusive monitoring of activities to support healthcare facilities. With the combination of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer, it enables a wide range of motion aware and motion controlled applications such as Sleep Monitoring System to detect body position during sleep. Sleep plays an important role in the well being of human and recovery of a patient. Inadequate and irregular sleeping are related to diseases such as depression and diabetes. Monitoring the body position and movement helps in determining sleep quality and irregular sleeping patterns.

At present, there have been a number of existing Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) WBAN sensing systems available in the market but the comparison of each individual system has not been put to a test. Experiments based on the different sleeping postures were conducted on the new implementation and the Shimmer 9DoF to compare the differences between them. The ability to capture a dynamic range of movements and fine-grained movements will be of great benefit.

The purpose of this Final Year Project is to provide a new implementation of a WBAN sensing system using a 9 Degree of Freedom (9DoF) sensor stick on a MicaZ Mote platform via I2C interface and compare the performance with the existing COTS sensing.