Remote health, activity, and asset monitoring with wireless sensor networks

Monitoring of personnel and assets in harsh or remote environments is a great challenge both from the organizational and the technical points of view. Usually, significant infrastructure investments and highly trained personnel are required. We propose a system that employs a wireless mesh sensor network to provide the communication backbone for stationary and wearable sensors. The sensor network is interfaced with a PC application through a TCP/IP connection, which allows for remote control along with data visualization and storage. The proposed system is reliable, inexpensive, rapidly deployable by minimally qualified personnel, automatically reconfigurable, and completely autonomous. It provides simultaneous monitoring of environmental and personal health and activity data and the capability of combining both for improved situation assessment. We discuss the proposed architecture and present an example system built to demonstrate the efficacy of this concept.