Data Monitoring and Gathering in Sensor Networks for Healthcare Applications

Abstract

The use of sensor technologies for monitoring the environment for a variety of purposes such as defense, health, education, comfort, the environmental, traffic, security, and the like would be an integral part of life. In contrast with traditional wireless networks, these systems need close coupling with physical environments. The networks of wireless sensors therefore present dramatically different design, deployment and usage challenges. The sensors should be networked so that measured and tracked parameters can be transmitted and disseminated to certain collection sites where more information is managed for decision making. Multiple sensors give the end user a fault tolerance and better parameter monitoring capability, both spatial and temporal, and can provide useful inferences of the physical world. In this paper, a review of data aggregation is performed for medical and healthcare applications.