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Fangmin Sun 1, 2 and Zhen Fang 1 and Zhan Zhao 1 and Lidong Du 1 and Shulei Chu 1, 2 and Diliang Chen 1, 2
Academic Editor:Honggang Wang
1, State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
2, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
Received 4 November 2014; Accepted 30 March 2015; 11 August 2015
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
Long-term and continuous health monitoring of people is increasingly popular as there are more and more aging people and subhealth persons. Motivated by the above requirement and promoted by the development of the wireless communication technology, the MEMS sensor technique, and the integrated circuit technology, wireless health monitoring system (WHMS) is advent and fast developed. In this paper, we designed a semi-self-organizing, dynamic, heterogeneous, and multihop (DHMH) WHMS for indoor healthcare aimed at monitoring the aging in the nursing homes and the white collar workers in the office buildings. By the referred "semi-self-organizing" we mean that the nodes in the DTL are non-self-organizing while the various kinds of HMNs in the DAL are self-organizing. The stationary DTL of the network makes the health monitoring system much more stable, while the mobility of the HMNs could enable the people being monitored to live normal lives without losing freedom.
Wireless communication standards used in the WHMS are many, such as Bluetooth, WiFi, ZigBee; Bluetooth is a common used technology for it is easy to connect with the-state-of-the-art Bluetooth devices such as mobile phone. However, Bluetooth is peer-to-peer communication and unable to format large scale networks. Though WiFi has a large coverage, the cost to build a WiFi network is comparatively high. ZigBee is a networking standard sponsored by the ZigBee Alliance and developed for low-data-rate, low-cost, and low-power-consumption wireless communication [1]. As health monitoring devices used in the WHMS are often featured with small size and resource limited, ZigBee is more suitable for the design of DHMH.
The advantages of the system proposed in this study can be summarized as follows. (1) According to the specific functions of...