以遠距照護與診斷輔助為應用之無線感測網路設計與實作

Abstract

由台灣經濟部資助的先進無線生醫保健監測系統(簡稱WHAM-BioS)計畫，是由於長期的監測病人的健康狀況而生。這篇論文的目標在設計並實作一個監測病人健康狀態的省電無線感測網路。為了降低感測節點的設計與硬體複雜度與能量消耗，多數的網路功能被集中在一個稱為人體閘道(HBG)的特殊目的的裝置。此裝置管理一個病人的感測節點，並將此病人的健康狀態向前傳輸，以供生物資訊之分析。為了降低感測節點與人體閘道間通訊的干擾之能源浪費，這篇論文提出了一些網路協定，讓人體閘道可以確保這些通訊間不會產生干擾。此外，這篇論文提出了一個省電機制來更進一步的降低感測節點在閒置監聽(idle listening)上的能量消耗。系統的軟體是以一個引入了一個中介層的分層化方式來實作的。此中介層將作業系統所提供的較低階的功能抽象化並提供一個更高階的介面給應用程式，此介面讓應用程式可以彼此互相通訊而不用考慮它們位於哪裡，以方便實作。我們已經根據所提出的網路與分層軟體架構來實作了一個健康照護系統的雛型，並使用藍芽與IEEE 802.11分別用來做叢集內與叢集間通訊。

The Wireless Health Advanced Mobile Bio-diagnostic System (abbreviated as WHAM-BioS) project, which is supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs have arisen from the need to monitor the health status of patients under long-term care programs. This thesis aims at designing and implementing an energy efficient wireless sensor network for monitoring the health status of the patients. To reduce the design and hardware complexity and power consumption of the sensor nodes, most network functionalities were concentrated in a special purposed device called Human Body Gateway (HBG) that administrates the sensor nodes of a single patient and transmit the health status of the patient forward for bioinformatics analysis. To reduce energy waste on interfered communications between sensor nodes and their HBG, network protocols were proposed in this thesis for the HBGs to insure that these communications will not interfere with each other. In addition, to further reduce the power consumption on idle listening of the sensor nodes, a power saving mechanism is proposed in this thesis. The software of the system is implemented in a layered fashion that introduces a middleware layer which abstracts the lower level functionalities of the operating system and exposes a higher level interface to the applications. The interface facilitates the applications to communicate with each other regardless where they reside to ease the implementation effort. We had implemented a health telecare system prototype based on the proposed network and layered software architecture and use Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 for inner and inter cluster communication respectively.