پديدآورندگان :
Karim Hesam Tehran University of Medical Sciences , Niakan Kalhori Sharareh R Tehran University of Medical Sciences , Moosavinasab Elham Tehran University of Medical Sciences
كليدواژه :
Wireless medical sensor network , mHealth , eHealth , uHealth
چكيده فارسي :
Background: Generally, a sensor node refers to any small device that is capable of sensing its environment. A Collection of sensors, that can cooperatively sense and collect the environmental data and transmit this information to the base station or remote location through wireless links, is called Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In recent decades, the application of these networks in medical and health domains, named wireless medical sensor networks (WMSN), is receiving increasing attention.
Objectives: The main objective of this study is to determine opportunities and challenges of WMSN in mobile health (mHealth).
Materials and Methods: This review study was conducted through electronic search of main relevant scientific databases: PubMed, Google scholar and IEEE.
Results: In a WMSN, the light weight medical devices and sensors work together to collect the individual’s physiological data such as blood pressure, blood sugar, heart beat rates, and send the collected data via a wireless channel to health professionals’ devices such as personal digital assistants, smartphones or laptops. After that, a physician can use these medical sensor readings to gain a broader assessment of the patient’s health status. Therefore, WMSNs can be used to provide real-time continuous or long term health monitoring for chronic and elderly patients in hospitals or home, and also can be a part of diagnostic procedure, maintenance of a chronic condition, supervised recovery from a surgical procedure, and can handle emergency events.
However, there are a number of challenges that need to be addressed before WMSNs can be effectively utilized for the new applications. These challenges include networking principles and protocols, communication standards, reliability, cost, usability, durability, simplicity and security.
Conclusion: WMSNs can play a remarkable role to not only save human lives but also to protect critical and valuable assets. Low power, high performance and fault tolerant wireless devices can be employed to eliminate medical errors, reduce workload and increase the efficiency of hospital staff, and improve the comfort of patients and quality of their life. Despite these advantages of WMSN, a number of challenging tasks should be addressed to make this technology affordable, robust, secure, and easy to use.
