International Journal of Engineering and Technology

This paper demonstrated the design of a wireless sensor network to monitor patients suffering from chronic diseases in their homes without regularly going to health center. Presently, most of the monitoring systems use personal computers (PC) to send patient’s health data (ECG in this case) to the hospital from patient’s home. Here, the idea is to eliminate the need of a PC thereby having a major cost reduction and still have a sustainable and effective system in place. The remote monitoring system consists of a WSN (wireless sensor network) in which nodes are placed in a patient’s home. These nodes are connected to a central node which is installed at the hospital through an internet connection. The nodes of the WSN consists of ECG sensors, PIC microcontroller, CC2500 low power wireless radio. At first ECG signals are sampled by a portable device which is connected to patient to be monitored. The sampled signals are then transmitted wirelessly to an access point located in the patient’s home through a CC2500 which works at a frequency of 2.4GHz. The access point is then connected to the internet through digital subscriber line router. Later, the data collected are sent to the hospital via internet for storage and further analysis. This remote monitoring can be advantageous in several ways. It can significantly reduce the cost of the entire setup by eliminating the need of a PC. There is a reduction in time to send the data as the need of turning the PC on every time has been diminished.