A sensor network architecture for mobile users

Abstract: Recent developments in sensor technology have resulted in the feasibility of deployingsensors 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 stresslevels.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 injuryor even death as a result, it would be very beneficial to remotely monitor the personnelto find those with critical body status and evacuate them from the dangerous area. Thiswould increase work safety and also allow for more efficient training. Another categoryof 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 monitoringboth a number of collaborative users, i.e., a team, and as well as a single user. Oneinteresting solution is to use a wireless sensor network (WSN). Another technology forremote monitoring is a personal area network (PAN). A PAN usually consists of consumerdevices, which enables it to communicate with existing infrastructure networks throughthe use of standardized protocols and technologies.This thesis investigates the feasibility of using a heterogeneous sensor network architecturefor the remote monitoring of a group of highly mobile users. The architecture is acombination of a WSN and PANs, which benefits from the mesh networking capabilitiesin WSN and the support for standardized protocols in PAN. The usage of the WSNincreases the network reliability and provides mobility and additional service (e.g. localization)to each user. The wearable PANs provide infrastructure network access pointsto sensor nodes, and hence support the mobility of the entire sensor network (by reusinguser’s mobile phone). Experimental results show that the proposed network architectureis a competitive solution for the targeted application, and I believe that this researchwork has the potential to drastically improve the life quality of a very large number ofusers, such as elderly and patients.