Towards u-health: An indoor 6LoWPAN based platform for real-time healthcare monitoring

Ubiquitous healthcare is the key to handle the challenges of the growing population around the world. A variety of u-healthcare systems have been developed using various short-range technologies and proprietary protocols which include Zigbee and bluetooth. With all these protocols, interoperability of smart devices remains a challenge. 6LoWPAN as an open standard has recently evolved to provide one common platform on the top of IEEE802.15.4 for low power devices and to mitigate this interoperability problem. In this paper, we present a novel 6LoWPAN based communication platform for next-generation u-healthcare system. The system integrates three nodes forwarding data to an edge router in order to provide real-time monitoring of the patient´s ECG, temperature, and acceleration. A PC connected to the edge router acts as a two-directional Gateway between 6LoWPAN and internet. A new gateway application, listening to UDP packets from the 6LoWPAN nodes via the edge router along with any TCP client request from the internet, is developed. Thereby, any remote PC can connect to the gateway using TCP/IP by just connecting to the IP address and dedicated port of the gateway, fostering then ubiquity as well as Internet of Things. Nevertheless, the user can send instructions to any node where the application running on the gateway translates the command to a particular node. In our case, we used a Labview program to provide this connectivity. The whole system was tested successfully for different ECG rates using an ECG simulator. The received waveforms were found identical to those shown by a high-resolution scope wired to the ECG signals.