Sensor Medium Access Control (SMAC)-based epilepsy patients monitoring system

With the increasing number of the epilepsy patients (EPs) and their growing need for continuous monitoring and immediate respond to their seizures, the Epilepsy Patients Monitoring System (EPMS) is proposed to be the fit solution for the healthcare monitoring applications especially for the EPs monitoring application. This paper focuses on the use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for the healthcare monitoring applications. The main objective of this system is to decrease the response time for the sudden seizure, protect patients from possible severe consequences and help them become comfortable with the monitoring process. Our EPMS consists of five regular nodes placed at specific sites on the patient´s body, as well as a coordinator node and a receiver node. The regular nodes detect seizures and forward the data to the coordinator, which collects the data and transmits it to the receiver. The Sensor Medium Access Control (SMAC) (a new MAC protocol specifically designed for WSNs) protocol has been used to decrease the generated delays and to achieve the highest throughput for the proposed system. We evaluate our proposed system via NS-2 simulations, and based on the numerical results, we show that SMAC-based system gives appropriate response time which achieves the expected objectives.