MEDiSN: Medical Emergency Detection in Sensor Networks

Outline:


The increasing aging population size, nursing staff shortages, and decreasing hospital capacities suggest that the current level of care may decrease in the future. Furthermore, lack of resources and communication infrastructure can also prevent first responders from saving lives in disaster response scenarios. In response to these challenges, we have assembled an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners to develop a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with the goal to automate the process of patient monitoring.

Our system consists of Patient Monitors (PMs), Relay Points (RPs) and a Doctor Station. The PMs (MiTags, shown in the figure) are custom made with a Sentilla Tmote Mini as its processing core. It is used to collect the patients' vital signs and pass over the information to the wireless mesh infrastructure of RPs. RPs relay packets to the Doctor Station via a tree protocol.

The system is being deployed at the operating room and post anesthesia care unit of the Shock Trauma Center of the University of Maryland Medical Center. Test results show that our system can easily adopt to real hospital environments with good performance. Additional tests at several hospitals in the Baltimore-Washington area are planned to test MEDiSN in a variety of situations.

Project Members:


Publications and Posters:

  • JeongGil Ko, Razvan Musaloiu-E., Jong Hyun Lim, Yin Chen, Andreas Terzis, Tia Gao, Walt Destler, Leo Selavo Demo Abstract: MEDISN: Medical Emergency Detection in Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2008, Raleigh, NC. November 2008.
  • JeongGil Ko, Yin Chen, Jong Hyun Lim, Razvan Musaloiu-E., Andreas Terzis, Tia Gao, Walt Destler, Leo Selavo. Wireless Sensor Networks for Patient Monitoring. Poster Abstract. Appeared in International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys) 2008. Breckenridge CO. June 2008.
  • Tia Gao, Christopher Pesto, Leo Selavo, Yin Chen, JeongGil Ko, JongHyun Lim, Andreas Terzis, Andrew Watt, James Jeng, Bor-rong Chen, Konrad Lorincz, and Matt Welsh. Wireless Medical Sensor Networks in Emergency Response: Implementation and Pilot Results. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security. Waltham, MA. May 2008.