Sensor grid applications in patient monitoring

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are finding an important role in patient monitoring in diverse environments including hospitals for post-operative patients and nursing homes for elderly patients. Sensor networking devices in WSNs are resource constrained since they have limited processing power and communication bandwidth. However, with a large number of such devices being deployed and aggregated over a wide area, WSNs have substantial data acquisition and processing capability. Thus, WSNs are important distributed computing resources that can be shared by different groups of patients in different environments. The emerging domain of WSNs with the grid extends the grid computing paradigm to the sharing of sensor resources in WSNs. In this perspective, by their very demand requirements and their socioeconomic impact, medical applications are certainly the most pertinent domain for using a wireless sensor grid. In this paper, we propose a wireless sensor grid architecture for monitoring the health status of different groups of patients to provide a platform for physicians and researchers to share information with distributed database and computational resources to facilitate analysis, diagnosis, prognosis and drug delivery.