Abreu Carlos, Miranda Francisco, Ricardo Manuel, Mendes Paulo Mateus
Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal.
Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo, Viana do Castelo, Portugal ; CIDMA, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
Springerplus. 2014 May 9;3:239. doi: 10.1186/2193-1801-3-239. eCollection 2014.
Biomedical wireless sensor networks are a key technology to support the development of new applications and services targeting patient monitoring, in particular, regarding data collection for medical diagnosis and continuous health assessment. However, due to the critical nature of medical applications, such networks have to satisfy demanding quality of service requirements, while guaranteeing high levels of confidence and reliability. Such goals are influenced by several factors, where the network topology, the limited throughput, and the characteristics and dynamics of the surrounding environment are of major importance. Harsh environments, as hospital facilities, can compromise the radio frequency communications and, consequently, the network's ability to provide the quality of service required by medical applications. Furthermore, the impact of such environments on the network's performance is hard to manage due to its random and unpredictable nature. Consequently, network planning and management, in general or step-down hospital units, is a very hard task. In such context, this work presents a quality of service based management tool to help healthcare professionals supervising the network's performance and to assist them managing the admission of new sensor nodes (i.e., patients to be monitored) to the biomedical wireless sensor network. The proposed solution proves to be a valuable tool both, to detect and classify potential harmful variations in the quality of service provided by the network, avoiding its degradation to levels where the biomedical signs would be useless; and to manage the admission of new patients to the network.
生物医学无线传感器网络是一项关键技术，可支持针对患者监测的新应用和服务的开发，特别是在用于医学诊断和持续健康评估的数据收集方面。然而，由于医疗应用的关键性质，此类网络必须满足严格的服务质量要求，同时保证高度的可信度和可靠性。这些目标受到多种因素的影响，其中网络拓扑、有限的吞吐量以及周围环境的特性和动态变化最为重要。诸如医院设施等恶劣环境可能会影响射频通信，进而影响网络提供医疗应用所需服务质量的能力。此外，由于此类环境对网络性能的影响具有随机性和不可预测性，因此难以管理。因此，无论是在医院整体还是在下级科室进行网络规划和管理都是一项非常艰巨的任务。在此背景下，本研究提出了一种基于服务质量的管理工具，以帮助医疗保健专业人员监督网络性能，并协助他们管理新传感器节点（即待监测患者）接入生物医学无线传感器网络的过程。所提出的解决方案被证明是一种有价值的工具，它既能检测和分类网络提供的服务质量中潜在的有害变化，避免其降至生物医学信号无用的水平，又能管理新患者接入网络的过程。
