Application of wireless sensor networks in healthcare and environmental monitoring

本提案的目的是推进用于医疗保健和环境/农业监测领域的无线传感器网络（wsn）中标准化无线个人区域网络（wpan）的研究和部署。标准化WPAN技术的部署将大大增加获得用于医疗保健和环境/农业监测的无处不在的wsn的经济有效解决方案的机会。在健康监测中，为了满足特定健康变量的带宽需求，我们会设计患者不显眼的个人无线传感器网络。我们还将设计将移动患者的个人WSN与医疗机构的网络互连的设备。我们将根据医疗信息系统的安全策略，在患者个人WSN和机构网络的基础上，设计健康感知数据的完整性、隐私性和可用性安全协议。最后，我们将在整个医疗网络中开发入侵检测系统。在环境/农业应用中，例如监测输电线路周围的条件或谷物/作物条件，监测的面积或体积很大，需要在很长一段时间内覆盖时间和空间均匀的信息吞吐量。这是一个具有挑战性的问题，因为传感器会因电池电量耗尽而逐渐死亡，而且不容易更换。为了解决这个问题，我们将开发异构网络架构、电源管理技术、互连设备和电源感知路由，以便在控制信息吞吐量的情况下延长整个覆盖区域的网络寿命。我们还将开发本地化和可视化技术作为用户界面。由于缺乏物理监督，在环境传感应用中，安全性是更大的问题。我们将开发环境监测传感器网络和入侵检测系统的密钥管理和认证协议。在我们的研究中，我们将使用分析和模拟技术来开发互连和安全协议。为了验证概念和技术转移，我们将为每个应用程序类实现测试平台。

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.