Application of wireless sensor networks in healthcare and environmental monitoring

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The aim of this proposal is to advance the research and deployment of standardized wireless personal area networks (WPANs) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for healthcare and environmental/agricultural monitoring areas. Deployment of standardized WPAN technologies will greatly increase the chances to obtain cost-effective solutions for ubiquitous WSNs for healthcare and environmental/agricultural monitoring. In health monitoring we will design patient's unobtrusive personal WSN in order to match the bandwidth needs of particular health variable. We will also design device which will interconnect mobile patient's personal WSN to healthcare institution's network. On top of patient's personal WSN and institution's network we will design security protocols for integrity, privacy and availability of sensed health data according to the security policy in medical information systems. Finally, we will develop intrusion detection system in the overall healthcare network. In environmental/agricultural applications such as monitoring of conditions around power transmission lines or grain/crop conditions, area or volume under surveillance is large and needs to be covered with temporally and spatially uniform information throughput over long periods of time. This is a challenging problem since sensors die gradually due to battery power exhaustion and can't be easily replaced. To solve this problem, we will develop heterogeneous network architecture, power management techniques, interconnection devices and power aware routing in order to prolong network life-time over the whole coverage area under controlled information throughput. We will also develop localization and visualization techniques as a user interface. Security is even bigger concern in environmental sensing applications due to the lack of physical supervision. We will develop key management and authentication protocols for environmental monitoring sensor networks as well as intrusion detection system. In our research we will use both analytical and simulation techniques to develop interconnection and security protocols. For the proof of concept and technology transfer we will implement test-bed for each application class.