Mobile Sensor Networks for 3 G Telemedicine Applications

Smart sensors have been used in several biomedical applications such as a glucose level monitor and cancer monitors. On the other hand, the mobile Internet user population has undergone a tremendous growth in the past few years. The cellular network is being rapidly upgraded to 3G. This paper proposes the sensor-based mobile telemedicine architecture to resolve the large-scale medical query resolution and multimedia transmission issue. Unfortunately there is very little research conducted in Mobile Sensor Networks for Telemedicine systems (MSNT). Most work separately focuses on either mobile networks or telemedicine system and cannot seamlessly integrate these two fields together. The main features of out scheme are as follows: (1) First, we utilize the infrastructure of 3G wideband wireless cellular networks where CDMA2000 is becoming a Media Access Control standard. (2) To implement communication anywhere, we assume a multi-layer hierarchical structure that includes the following cell-sizes: pico-cell, micro-cell, macro-cell and satellite-cell. A mobile user can use soft handoff to contact the base station with the strongest communication signal strength. (3) Sensor Telemedicine Networks are seamlessly integrated with the aforementioned 3G mobile networks. In the future telemedicine systems, patients will carry medical sensors that sense the following health parameters: body temperature, blood pressure, pulse oxymetry, ECG, breathing activity, and so on. In addition, serious patients may also carry other sensors that help the medical center carry out remote monitoring. Typical examples are location sensor, motion or activity sensor, microphone sensor, and camera sensor. Typically a patient will presumably carry a wristdevice with stronger battery and higher memory compared to the other medical sensors to perform multiple-hop ad hoc communication. Those devices are referred to as super-sensors in this paper. They can collect sensing data from other body sensors and communicate with other super-sensors. However, those tiny wrist-devices do not have enough power as today’s cell phone to perform two-way communication with the base stations. They transmit data through multi-hop routing algorithm (see Figure 1).