A sensor network architecture for mobile users

Abstract: Recent developments in sensor technology have resulted in the feasibility of deploying sensors on a human user in order to sense physiological properties such as body temperature, pulse and posture. This enables monitoring of a user’s health condition and stress levels. Some professions, such as first responders, are often operating in dangerous situations, which causes increased stress levels. Since stress can lead to poor performance with injury or even death as a result, it would be very beneficial to remotely monitor the personnel to find those with critical body status and evacuate them from the dangerous area. This would increase work safety and also allow for more efficient training. Another category of potential users for remote monitoring of health conditions are patients and elderly, who could enjoy a higher quality of life with the increased safety of remote monitoring. As a result, it is highly motivated to find a technology which is applicable for monitoring both a number of collaborative users, i.e., a team, and as well as a single user. One interesting solution is to use a wireless sensor network (WSN). Another technology for remote monitoring is a personal area network (PAN). A PAN usually consists of consumer devices, which enables it to communicate with existing infrastructure networks through the use of standardized protocols and technologies. This thesis investigates the feasibility of using a heterogeneous sensor network architecture for the remote monitoring of a group of highly mobile users. The architecture is a combination of a WSN and PANs, which benefits from the mesh networking capabilities in WSN and the support for standardized protocols in PAN. The usage of the WSN increases the network reliability and provides mobility and additional service (e.g. localization) to each user. The wearable PANs provide infrastructure network access points to sensor nodes, and hence support the mobility of the entire sensor network (by reusing user’s mobile phone). Experimentalresults show that the proposed network architecture is a competitive solution for the targeted application, and I believe that this research work has the potential to drastically improve the life quality of a very large number of users, such as elderly and patients.