Wireless Pers Commun DOI 10.1007/s11277-014-1720-4
Energy Efficient Vital Signs Monitoring System (VSMS) Using Wireless Sensor Networks Syed Waqad Ali Hashmi · Bilal A. Alvi · Muhammad Rehan · M. Shujaat Kamal · M. Yasir Zaheen
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Intensive care unit (ICU) also known as critical care unit is the most sensitive section of any hospital and the specialized team of doctors and nurses along with the best equipment is usually deployed at this unit. A patient receives extra ordinary facilitation at ICU and continuous monitoring is done. As the patient is recovered, he is shifted to the ward or room for further assistance. During shifting of patient, the rehabilitation is in process and the continuous monitoring is required. As the patient is moving, so the monitoring process is difficult and in this time the emergency situation may result in the death of the patient as well in extreme cases. In this situation the need of precise and continuous monitoring system is arrived, which has been fulfilled by this work. Patient’s temperature, heart beats and blood pressure is continuously monitored in this wok using wireless sensor network (WSN). The WSN kit monitors several parameters and transfer it the panel monitors at the observation (or control) room and in case of any emergency, necessary actions would be easy to take. This paper proposed an energy efficient vital sign monitoring system using WSN. The power of WSN nodes which is the very important issue in WSN is minimize using the genetic algorithm. Keywords
Wireless sensor network · Genetic algorithm · ICU · Energy efficient
S. W. A. Hashmi (B) · B. A. Alvi · M. Rehan · M. S. Kamal · M. Y. Zaheen Electronic Engineering Department, Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan e-mail:
[email protected] B. A. Alvi e-mail:
[email protected] M. Rehan e-mail:
[email protected] M. S. Kamal e-mail:
[email protected] M. Y. Zaheen e-mail:
[email protected]
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1 Introduction We all are familiar with the environment in the hospitals so pathetic, horrible and risky. So many people are surviving between death and life, by the virtue of God many of these risky patients survived and got life again, due to the hard- working of doctors and staff who continuously monitor the Vitals symptoms of patients by assembling sensors and multiple monitoring machines with the patient. Most risky patients are admitted in intensive care unit (ICU), where all vital monitoring systems are available and the staff continuously monitors the vital symptoms. Once the patient has partially recovered from the disease he is shifted from the ICU to some ward or private room of the hospital, the patient lost all facilities of continuous monitoring. The proposed system is this paper i.e. vital signs monitoring system (VSMS) continuously monitors the human vital symptoms using wireless sensor networks (WSN). WSNs are now becoming the widely used technology in many different areas and applications such as Industrial automation, communication, navigation, mining and agriculture. Now WSN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other wireless networks are widely used in heath monitoring systems for monitoring heart rate, pulse rate, blood pressure (BP), electrocardiogram, saturation of peripheral oxygen (SpO2 ) and body temperature [3,5]. Generally patients are treated and monitored in ICU, wards and rooms but our system provides facilitation not only in beds but also when the patient is moving within the premises of the hospital. It helps the doctors and para- medical staff to monitor the patient vital signs at every instance of time as well as improves the quality of service for the patient. The VSMS continuously acquire four parameters of the patients namely blood pressure systolic (BPS) also known as upper BP, blood pressure diastolic (BPD) also termed as lower BP [10], heart beat (HB) [10,6] and SpO2 [1] and then transmit it wirelessly using IEEE standard 802.11 (WSN) [12,8] to the monitoring device at base terminal station (BTS). The acquired data is continuously scrutinized looking for signs of clinical aggravation. The BTS has programmed with the acceptable ranges of BPS, BPD, HB and SpO2 [5,1]. If the machine found any sign outside the acceptable range, the system will activate warnings and ring the alarm so that the nurse, para-medial staff or the attendant get aware of the vital signs of the patient. The ranges defined for the above mentioned four parameters are shown in Table 1. The complete representation of the proposed system is shown in Fig. 1. Presently, most of the hospitals are monitoring the vital signs of the patients through hard wire equipment’s attached aside of the patient’s bed that confines patient to his bed. WSN based VSMS do not restrict patient on bed, it allow the patients to move within the hospital premises and the VSMS will acquire data timely and transmit it to the BTS where it is monitored and necessary actions are taken. Currently, many systems are developed on vital sign monitoring system by using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other IEEE Wireless networks but it allow patients to remain within the range of 10–100 m from the base station, if these limits are exceeded it becomes quite difficult or
Table 1 Acceptable ranges for monitored parameters
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Monitoring parameter
Acceptable range
BPS (upper BP)
