A wireless body area network for pervasive health monitoring within smart environments

A wireless wearable health monitoring system that is capable of tracking various vital signs and trigger emergency aid when abnormalities are detected, is proposed. The strength of the system lies in its distributed nature of operating either in standalone mode or integrating into a smart environment platform. A description of a basic version of the system is presented, together with preliminary results obtained from the experimental set-up. It is demonstrated that the developed body area network performs as expected for simple monitoring such as fall detection and for correlation of activity levels with other medical information to reduce false triggering of alarms.