Wireless sensor network for wearable physiological monitoring

Wearable physiological monitoring system consists of an array of sensors embedded into the fabric of the wearer to continuously monitor the physiological parameters and transmit wireless to a remote monitoring station. At the remote monitoring station the data is correlated to study the overall health status of the wearer. In the conventional wearable physiological monitoring system, the sensors are integrated at specific locations on the vest and are interconnected to the wearable data acquisition hardware by wires woven into the fabric. The drawbacks associated with these systems are the cables woven in the fabric pickup noise such as power line interference and signals from nearby radiating sources and thereby corrupting the physiological signals. Also repositioning the sensors in the fabric is difficult once integrated. The problems can be overcome by the use of physiological sensors with miniaturized electronics to condition, process, digitize and wireless transmission integrated into the single module. These sensors are strategically placed at various locations on the vest. Number of sensors integrated into the fabric form a network (Personal Area Network) and interacts with the human system to acquire and transmit the physiological data to a wearable data acquisition system. The wearable data acquisition hardware collects the data from various sensors and transmits the processed data to the remote monitoring station. The paper discusses wireless sensor network and its application to wearable physiological monitoring and its applications. Also the problems associated with conventional wearable physiological monitoring are discussed. © 2008 Academy Publisher.