Abstract
This paper describes the basic system concept for pervasive healthcare and presents a wireless sensing system for healthcare to monitor physiological state in the living environment. The importance of constantly monitoring, analysing and utilizing human daily information has been growing in the area of healthcare. The introduction of ICT in the areas of medicine and welfare has created new systems and services for healthcare and can help promote disease prevention and health maintenance through wirelessly delivered healthcare and ubiquitous medicine. The availability of information about a person’s daily physiological state and activity makes it possible to judge their health condition and behaviors and provide predictive diagnoses and treatment.
The objective of the work is to establish a wearable wireless body area network (BAN) system that is useful in pervasive healthcare. In this work we developed a wireless sensing system to monitor thermal physiological state. Sensors which make up a wireless system are varied depending on the purpose of use of the system. Wearable small-sized and wireless sensors which consume little power have to be developed to measure the desired vital signals or human data. Moreover, reliable wireless communication network is needed to obtain the data of multiple wearable sensors in real time. BAN can realize wireless connectivity among sensors deployed on human body.
The important indicators for monitoring the thermal physiological state are core body temperature, microclimate within clothing, skin temperature, heart rate and movement. To develop the monitoring system, ear-worn temperature sensors, thermo-hygrometers and skin temperature sensors were newly developed. The earworn temperature sensor enables a continuous non-invasive measurement of the equivalent of core body temperature in daily life. The thermo-hygrometer can measure microclimate within clothing. These sensors transmit data wirelessly in synchronization with each other. Data can be obtained reliably in daily life without restraining wearers’ movements using multiple networked wearable sensors with a reasonable battery life. The level of data loss in wireless communication was low making it possible to estimate physiological state using more than 10 sensors simultaneously, even though both the IEEE 802.15.4 radio and the low power radio coexist.
The application system for the prevention of heat stroke was evaluated on two situations. One is for the prevention of heat stroke and feeling sick during exercise in conditions of high ambient temperature and humidity. The other is for the prevention of indoor heat stroke among the elderly. It is necessary to recognize individual behaviors to be able to provide appropriate support based on the context. Some activities to be recognized at home were learned and identified using the location data. Experiments showed that the detection of the abnormal level of several kinds of physiological data and their change was effective in judging the physiological state and giving a warning on the health condition in the context of the activities and surroundings. This system will be broadly applicable to healthcare in everyday life such as temperature control for heat stroke prevention and lifestyle management based on the circadian rhythm and health condition.
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Sugimoto, C. (2013). Wireless Sensing System for Healthcare Monitoring Physiological State and Recognizing Behavior in Daily Life. In: Mukhopadhyay, S., Postolache, O. (eds) Pervasive and Mobile Sensing and Computing for Healthcare. Smart Sensors, Measurement and Instrumentation, vol 2. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32538-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32538-0_8
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