Elderly health care systems — Part I: Hardware implementations of wireless sensor networks

In this short note, we develop a simple health care monitoring system based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for the elderly. Physiological signals being measured are blood pressure, blood glucose level, ear temperature, SpO₂, and weight. Since we assume that only a limited open space is available for the elderly, many physical hinders such as brick wall blocking wireless signal transmission are omitted in this studied. Both hardware and software are being developed and designed. The hardware uses in stock merchandise, which is modified for accommodating RF modules. The software is completely designed and developed by using Visual Basic and Access database system. The effectiveness of the constructed health care system has been successfully applied to community services at Kaohsiung city, Taiwan.