Wireless Body Area Network for health monitoring

Advances in wireless sensor network technologies have realized new opportunities to form Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for pervasive remote monitoring of the patients' vital signs at hospital and remote homecare environment, thereby improving healthcare system. The wireless physiological body sensor node is capable of sensing and processing the vital signals as well as communicating to the Network Coordinator for the transmission of these signals for remote monitoring. This paper presents design and implementation of a prototype for low power WBAN for remote monitoring of patients' physiological signals such as ECG, body temperature and respiration rate. The sensor nodes and Network Coordinator are connected in star network using proprietary nRF24L01 transceiver modules from Nordic Semiconductors, operating in 2.4GHz license free ISM band. The connectivity of WBAN to commercially available PDA as base station is provided using KC21 Bluetooth module from OEM Kcwirefree.