A Smart Gateway Design For Health Care System Using Wireless Sensor Network

Using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in health care system has yielded a tremendous effort in recent years. However, in most of these researches, tasks like sensor data processing, health states decision making and emergency messages sending are done by a remote server. Numbers of patient with large scale of sensor data consume a lot of communication resource, bring a burden to the remote server and delay the decision time and notification time. In this paper, we present a prototype of a smart gateway that we have implemented. This gateway is an interconnection and services management platform especially for WSN health care systems at home environments, by building a bridge between WSN and public communication networks, compatible with an on-board data decision system (DDS) and a lightweight database, which enable to make the patient's health states decision in the gateway in order to get faster response time to the emergencies.We have also designed the communication protocols between WSN, gateway and remote servers. Additionally Ethernet, Wi-Fi and GSM/GPRS communication module are integrated into the smart gateway in order to report and notify information to care-givers. We have conducted experiments on the proposed smart gateway by performing it together with a wireless home e-health care sensor network and a simulated remote server. The results show that it is reliable and has low latency and low power consumption.