Thomas Falck

Plug 'n Play Simplicity for Wireless Medical Body Sensors

Wireless medical body sensors are a key technology for unobtrusive health monitoring. The easy setup of such wireless body area networks is crucial to protect the user from the complexity of these systems. But automatically forming a wireless network comprising all sensors attached to the same body is challenging. We present a method for making wireless body-worn medical sensors aware of the persons they belong to by combining body-coupled with wireless communication. This enables a user to create a wireless body sensor network by just sticking the sensors to her body. A personal identifier allows sensors to annotate their readings with a user ID thereby ensuring safety in personal healthcare environments with multiple users.

Network Topologies, Communication Protocols, and Standards

Every network has a topology that determines the way in which different devices of the network are arranged and how they communicate with each other. Here we need to distinguish between physical and logical topologies. The former refers to the physical layout of the network, i.e., the way that devices are physically connected to the network, either through actual cables or direct wireless communication links. By contrast, the logical topology of a network refers to the manner that data flows through the network from one node to the other without worrying about the physical interconnection of the devices for transporting a packet from a source to a destination device. The two lower layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model (ISO/IEC international standard, Information technology – open systems interconnection – basic reference model: the basic model, 2nd edn, 1994) , the physical and data link layer, define the physical topology of a network, while the network layer is responsible for the logical topology.

BASUMA - the sixth sense for chronically ill patients

Continuous monitoring and analyzing of vital signs is the key for detecting at an early stage when a patients state of health changes to the worse, thereby preventing emergency cases, which are harmful to the patient and costly for the healthcare system. The BASUMA project is concerned with developing an energy-efficient and robust system-on-chip platform for wireless body sensors networks that enable health monitoring of chronically ill patients in their own homes. Initial application areas of BASUMA are: improving the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients and enhancing the ambulatory chemo therapy of women suffering from breast cancer

Quality of Service for IEEE 802.15.4-based Wireless Body Sensor Networks

We present a novel mechanism intended to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for IEEE 802.15.4-based Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSN) used for pervasive healthcare applications. The mechanism was implemented and validated on the AquisGrain WBSN platform. Our results show that the QoS performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard can be considerably improved in terms of reliability and timeliness for intra-node as well as inter-node scenarios while keeping backward compatibility to ensure interoperability.

Wearable body sensor network towards continuous cuff-less blood pressure monitoring

We present a wearable IEEE 802.15.4-based Body Sensor Network (BSN) that enables continuous cuff-less blood pressure monitoring, opening up new perspectives for hypertension diagnosis and treatment, cardio-vascular event detection, and stress monitoring. Arterial blood pressure is estimated based on the Pulse Arrival Time (PAT), which is measured using a single lead electrocardiogram (ECG) patch on the chest and a photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensor at the finger or ear. Measurement context information-user posture and activity level-is extracted using a 3-D acceleration sensor. Since precise PAT measurements require the synchronization of the BSN devicespsila clocks, the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) was implemented. The acquired data are stored and displayed on a PDA or a wristwatch. Our BSN can currently operate for up to eight hours and perform PAT measurements under moderate activity conditions. Future work includes higher motion tolerance, posture-corrected blood pressure estimation and on-sensor data processing and storage.

Towards Plug-and-Play Interoperability for Wireless Personal Telehealth Systems

This survey paper serves as an introduction to the challenges and needs related to wireless personal telehealth systems and provides an overview of ongoing activities in industry and various communication standards, aiming to enable plug-and-play interoperability. Specifically, we address a recently founded industry consortium, the Continua Health Alliance, and ongoing standardization efforts within the family of ISO 11073/IEEE 1073 standards, the Bluetooth SIG, and the ZigBee Alliance.

PLASMADS: Smart mobiles meet intelligent environments

Pervasive connectivity over short-range RF technology will provide mobile devices access to interaction opportunities with people, services and contents, being offered by other nearby mobile devices as wen as by local bot spot infrastructures. Currently the mobile device is dumb and the infrastructure knows everything, or vice versa. Mobile devices sucb as PDAs and smart phones are becoming more and more powerful and bot spots provide more and more services. One of the major problems that have to be solved before real pervasiveness is achieved, is how to enable a specific mobile device to use services offered at a hot spot that bas Just been detected. With the variety of mobile devices, platforms, programming languages, operating systems etc. it is very likely that the mobile and the hot spot do not use the same components, i.e. they are not capable to cooperate. We present a system architecture and middlewarel for pervasive connectivity that is based on open standards such as UPnP and Web Services. Thus, it allows out of the box interaction between mobile devices, services and hot spot infrastructures.