Tesis doctoral de María Begoña Otal Ruiz
Many countries across the globe are facing an enormous and growing challenge: how to meet the needs and demands of a rapidly increasing senior population for quality healthcare, aging services and disease management of chronic complications associated to age (e.G. Neurodegenerative disorders, chronic cardiac diseases, cancer, or even diabetes). The number of old adults will expand rapidly, placing greater strain on our already overburdened healthcare delivery system and national resources. The question is how to best provide and pay for the care of our seniors, who are living longer and demanding a higher quality of life and independence in their golden years. The answer may include an increased reliance and use of emerging technology tools to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the medical and healthcare industry, enable faster communication, and provide new brand wireless healthcare monitoring devices, diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Advances in science and medicine are closely linked; they are characterised by episodic imaginative leaps, often with dramatic effects on mankind and beyond. The advent of wireless body sensor networks (bsns) represents such a leap. The reason for this stems from the fact that all branches of modern medicine, ranging from prevention to complex intervention, rely heavily on early, accurate, and complete diagnosis followed by close monitoring of the results. Bsn patient monitoring systems will provide information that is likely to be of striking importance and highly revolutionary. like other wireless data networks, bsns are formed by nodes (body sensors), which dynamically establish and break radio links among them in order to deliver an effective and trustworthy communication. The radio channel is common and shared by all body sensors that belong to the bsn. The medium access control (mac) layer is responsible for coordinating channel accesses, by avoiding collisions and scheduling data transmissions, to maximize throughput efficiency at an acceptable packet delay and minimal energy consumption. Therefore, it is required to define proper mac protocols with a number of rules that guarantee the efficient use of the radio channel, and take stringent medical requirements into account. The medical domain generally implies more rigorous requirements on reliability and energy consumption. Since vital signals are measured for real-time monitoring and diagnostic purposes, bsns must have a guaranteed maximum latency and a low packet loss (i.E. Quality of service (qos)). Moreover, in order to avoid frequent battery-replacement and to keep the size of body sensors small, reducing the energy-consumption for data communication is of dramatic importance. Hence, these stringent medical requirements and the unreliability of wireless communication create a specific need for further improving mac protocols in bsns. this phd thesis aims for the analysis of bsns and the optimization of properly adapted mac protocols with the proposal of energy-saving techniques and novel scheduling algorithms to increase qos in the medical domain. First and foremost, we target at further examining the new requirements of this specific type of wireless sensor networks to satisfy the current market demands in the medical and healthcare field. Energy-saving mechanisms to prolong body sensors battery lifetime and smart scheduling mechanisms to enable the efficient use of the radio channel will allow the future development of novel healthcare monitoring, diagnostic and therapeutic applications. since currently the ieee 802.15.4 framework appears to be the most suitable standard for bsns, we study and analyze this standard. The optimization of the herewith presented mac protocol enhancements will include an especially designed mac functional definition for ambient and body sensor networks to cover a broad scope and high-dense traffic areas (i.E. Hospital settings). The main areas of research for the new designed mac protocol will contain power management techniques, cross-layer definitions and scheduling mechanisms, mostly based on fuzzy logic rules. Within the phd a further evaluation of the overall body sensor networking performance is done through a software simulation platform, where the analytically proposed mac protocol definition, power management techniques, and fuzzy-ruled cross-layer scheduling algorithms are tested. The hereby presented schemes have always in mind the efficient management of channel resources and the overall minimization of ambient and body sensors networking energy consumption in order to prolong their battery lives.
Datos académicos de la tesis doctoral «Optimization of wireless ambient and body sensor networks for medical applications«
- Título de la tesis: Optimization of wireless ambient and body sensor networks for medical applications
- Autor: María Begoña Otal Ruiz
- Universidad: Politécnica de catalunya
- Fecha de lectura de la tesis: 13/05/2010
Dirección y tribunal
- Director de la tesis
- Luis Gonzaga Alonso Zarate
- Tribunal
- Presidente del tribunal: Ana isabel Pérez neira
- pantelis Angelidis (vocal)
- albert Alonso beltran (vocal)
- marco Di renzo (vocal)