Biomedical Sensor Network

for Cardiovascular Fitness and Activity Monitoring

CONTENTS:

Abstract Introduction Examples Architecture Network Protocol Intra and Internal Communication Conclusion

Abstract

This paper describes a prototype model for cardiovascular activity and fitness monitoring system based on IEEE 11073 family of standard for medical device communication. It identifies basic requirements for developing a biomedical sensor network having resource limited sensor nodes to acquire, retrieve and communicate various physiological parameters while using short range wireless technologies. IEEE 11073-10441 defines the set of protocols for tele-health environment at application layer and rest of the communication infrastructure is covered by the medical grade ZigBee network. In healthcare, space ZigBee provides an industry-wide standard for exchanging data between a variety of medical and non-medical devices and ZigBee enabled medical devices are fully compatible with ISO/IEEE 11073 for point-of-care medical device communication.

The proposed prototype model addresses design and development issues required to report any severe cardiovascular malfunctioning without compromising mobility and convenience of the patient.

Introduction to Sensors

What is a sensor?

A sensor is a device that receives input from a physical or energetic phenomenon such as light, heat, or force and converts it into a usable input form like electricity. Another device acts on the input and performs suitable action.

What are smart sensors?

Are built using a combination of sensors and integrated circuits used to perform suitable actions on the sensed input.

Have wireless capabilities in order to communicate with an external device.

Introduction to Biomedical Sensor Network

The idea of Biomedical Sensor Network (BSN) is derived from a thought of mixing wireless technologies and advancements in the field of biosensors for assessment of physiological parameters offering the medical assistance to the person in need. The purpose of BSN, also called Body Sensor Networks, is to provide an integrated hardware and software platform for facilitating the future development of pervasive monitoring systems. It offer prompt feedback for efficient and reliable patient monitoring, disease management and promotes self-care.

A BSN consists of 5 to 10 invasive or non-invasive sensor nodes acquiring physiological signals from the subject body and transmitting it to the network coordinator through wireless channel.

Introduction to Biomedical Sensor Network (Continued)

Wireless Biomedical Sensor Networks (WBSN, for short), the convergence of biosensors, wireless communication and networks technologies, consists of a collective of wireless networked low-power biosensor devices ("motes" or "nodes"), which integrate an embedded microprocessor, radio and a limited amount of storage. WBSN can wirelessly monitor patients physiological signals (EEG, ECG, blood pressure, blood flow, pulse oxymeter, glucose level, etc.) by individual node or pill that is worn, carried or swallowed by the patients. The swallowed pills with wireless transceiver containing sensors that can detect enzymes, nucleic acids, intestinal acidity, pressure, contractions of intestinal muscle and other parameters, allow WBSN involved in the Gastrointestinal diseases monitoring in a non- invasive manner.

Introduction to Biomedical Sensor Network (Continued)

Biomedical Sensor Applications

Glucose level monitors.

Wireless blood sensors implanted in the human body. Sensors monitor glucose levels and transmit that to external display device, say, wrist watch.

Cancer Detectors.

Cancer cells exude nitric oxide in the tissue surrounding the tumor. Sensors can be implanted in such locations to detect abnormalities.

General Health Monitors.

NASA has been working on pill-sized packages containing sensors for monitoring surrounding conditions. Small pills containing sensors can be swallowed thus enabling wireless transmission of intestinal conditions or diagnose gastrointestinal diseases.

Architecture

The goal of this work is to present a formal BSN model using Chipcon CC-2420 radio transceiver that operates in accordance with ZigBee communication standard and analyze traffic and performance issues. This proposed model describes a basic BSN architecture when different sensor nodes share the same medium with different packet rates and packet sizes. This model, simulated with the help of OMNeT++ discreet event simulation environment. This proposed architecture is supported by five physiological sensors acquiring Electrocardiogram (ECG), Blood Pressure (BP), Blood Oxygen Saturation, Temperature and Accelerators and Gyroscopes for Body Movement. This multi-parametric and multidimensional time series information is transmitted by each individual sensor node to the BSN coordinator.

Architecture (Continued)

Architecture (Continued)

All detection decisions are taken at this stage with the help of advance Digital Signal Processors and other integrated application software platforms. Critical alarm signals and periodic diagnosis information is sent to medical professionals for further actions using extra-BSN communication link.

This link is facilitated by existing public communication network. However this work is focused only for intra-BSN communication of physiological information.

Health Care Monitoring System

Health Care Monitoring System

The detailed study of working of each major nodes present in the health care monitoring system:

The sensor nodes: Sensor nodes sense, process and communicate vital signs.
They store acquired data and transmit them to the base station before their memory fills. The sensors consist of an ECG and a pulse oxymeter. The ECG sensor monitors the heart electrical activity.

The base station or central control node: The base station is a Personal Digital
Assistant (PDA). It is carried by the patient and communicates with sensor nodes via a Network Coordinator (base station). The wireless communication is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and the Network Coordinator is attached to the base station. To communicate with the central server, the base station employs a WLAN to reach an Internet access point (e.g., home gateway).

Health Care Monitoring System

The central server: The central server performs central data storage. It receives the
sampled physiological data and stores it to the database. As mentioned above, this enables doctors to do long-term analysis and predict heart attacks or other life threatening conditions.

Wireless Sensor Nodes

Wireless sensor nodes include the three- lead ECG sensor, and the pulse sensor. With development of micro-electro- mechanical technology, some of the sensors can be incorporated into one sensor collecting several types of biomedical information. The wireless sensor node of the proposed network consists of biosensor, analog to digital converter (ADC) module, signal processing module, microcontroller, memory unit, Zigbee communication module and antenna. The sensors in a node are in charge of collecting original biomedical signal. Commonly the original biomedical signal amplitude and its ratio of signal to noise are too low to satisfy the A/D conversion circuit. Therefore, before being sent into ADC, the biomedical signal is filtered and amplified. The ADC module of CC2420 has eight analog input pins which can be configured into eight single-ended inputs or four pairs of differential inputs.

Wireless Sensor Nodes

Storage unit has 32, 64 or 128kb flash memory and 10kb RAM to be chosen. The central processing unit (CPU) of MCU is the enhanced 8051 core which uses the standard 8051 instruction set. The signal processing module is designed to check some potential and unconspicuous symptoms (such as hypertension)at the sensor node without physician appearing through body temperature, blood oxygen or the pulse ,body temperature, blood pressure.

Wireless Health Monitoring

iPhone Heart Monitor uses the inbuilt microphone on your iPhone 3G or headphone microphone to listen to and detect your heart beats.

It can be used to find your resting heart rate (a good measure of fitness), track how your heart rate changes and check your heart rate immediately after training. Monitoring can combat chronic diseases.

Wireless Diagnostic Methods

New signaling technology can be embedded into drug tablets. Swallowed pill transmits information from within the body.

Device signals a cell phone or laptop that the pill has been ingested, in turn informing doctors or a family member.
When a patient takes the pill, it communicates with the second main element of the system a small electronic device carried or worn by the patient.

WBASN Signal Processing and Communication Framework

Recent improvements in signal processing and very- low-power wireless communications have motivated great interest in the development and application of wireless technology in healthcare and biomedical research, including Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs). WSPC framework consists of three major components for real-time applications, namely Sensing And Pre-processing (SAP), Application-specific WBASN Communication(AWC) and Data Analysis and Feedback(DAF) to the patient. Sensing and pre-processing: Sensor platform architecture typically consists of a sensing device, an Operating System(OS) and a communication and power management elements.

WBASN Signal Processing and Communication Framework

WBASN Signal Processing and Communication Framework

Pre-processing: Manifested by the procedures performed on the raw data to be

ready for analyzes and processing by the application. Pre-processing technique transforms the data into a format that will be more easily and effectively processed for the user purpose.

Data Filtering: Filtering refers to the process of defining, detecting and correcting
errors in sensed data, due to mixing with external noisy data, with the purpose of minimizing the impact of these errors for the succeeding analyses.

Compression: In contrast to filtering, which potentially focuses on reducing errors

and unnecessary data (such as duplicate data), compression focuses on reducing the amount of physical data traffic that the sensor sends over the wireless channel, to improve bandwidth utilization, power consumption and possibly speed of processing and memory space required by application.

WBASN Signal Processing and Communication Framework

WBASNS communication technologies: Communication technologies in WBASN

are a radio frequency wireless networking technology-based that interconnects tiny nodes through sensor or actuator capabilities in, or inside a human body.

Gateway data fusion: Data fusion is commonly known as the use of technique(s)
that can combine both data and related information from multiple sensors in order to achieve correct and reliable data.

Data analysis and feedback: Due to large volume of acquired data required to
diagnose them, sophisticated techniques are required for analysis to extract relevant features, which can help in efficiently detecting and classifying anomalies with high precision.

Working Flow

Though the object of the proposed wireless sensor network is to monitor potential patient and to routine check up, it is unnecessary to keep unremittingly transmitting information between the wireless sensor node and the central control node. Using these operating modes, the Zigbee module can work in a way of Wake up Ondemand in order to reduce power consumption. Zigbee module can be activated once one of the following wakeup events appears: In sleep mode, most internal circuits are powered down and external interrupts, 32.768 kHz oscillator and sleep timer peripherals are active. I/O pins retain the I/O mode. ECG signal acquiring circuit is turn off and other acquiring circuits go on working.

Working Flow

In active mode, all modules are active and the biomedical signals are acquired, stored and transmitted. The communicating progress does not stop until the sensor node receives an end demand.

Network Protocol

The need of an interconnected network is because:

The system should enable automatic establishment and configuration of the sensor network; The system should support reliable and automatic network reconfiguration in case of new or removal of the existing sensors; Sensor network access methods have to provide a consistent interface for access to sensors regardless of their type, measured phenomena; The networked sensors can provide higher level medical performance by coordination; Multi- hop routing is necessary for large area monitoring.

Network Protocol

Wireless network protocol stacks are the realization of many functionalities of WBSN mentioned in the former sections, such as authentication, prioritized traffic, security ,data delivery, cooperative sensing, power-aware link, and routing etc. The different layers included in protocol has different functionality:

Physical layer takes care for the issues related to control of biomedical sensor
device.

Medium Access Control and Data Link Layer performs elementary processing
after fusing information obtained from multiple sources and incorporate error handling mechanism into physical data.

Network Layer is responsible for trend analysis and event detection for acquired
physiological information.

Network Protocol

Sensor node application layer defines

applications associated with a particular medical parameter.

Application layer interact with physical

process or sensor through sensor device manager for acquisition and physical layer directly interacts with wireless channel for communication of acquired information.

The figure shows the BSN Sensing Node.

Network Protocol

The data link layer specifies medium access control scheme, authentication and security protocols to ensure reliable and secure connections in a WBSN. Existing MAC protocols can be classified into four categories: scheduling based, collision free, contention based, and hybrid schemes. Two MAC schemes are suggested here for WBSN. The first one is IEEE 802.15.4 MAC based scheme, which is the optional contention-free time slot in addition to contention period time slots.

INTRA- AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

The overall system model is divided into three principal components:

The domain information model (DIM), The service model, and The communication model.

Domain information model: Domain information model (DIM), is a hierarchical model that describes a BSN node as a set of objects. These objects represent the elements that control behavior of the Physical process sensing mechanism and report the status of the BSN nodes to the BSN coordinator as and when required. Some of the important physical parameters covered under IEEE 11073-10441 are heart rate, breathing rate, altitude, latitude, longitude, intensity of activity, stride length, session duration etc. These attributes are represented in five different formats given as medical device system (MDS), numeric, real time sampled arrays (RTSA), scanner and persistent metric stores (PM-Stores) DIM is described with the help of Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN) and the data formats described in DIM can also be used by other platforms for feature extraction at latter stages.

INTRA- AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Domain Information Model:

Subject Body

DIM attributes of Physiological and Environmental Parameters

Cardiovascular activity and fitness monitoring device (MDS)

INTRA- AND INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

Service model defines conceptual mechanism for data exchange. This model maps messages
exchanged between sensor nodes and BSN coordinator. Protocol messages are defined as ASN.1 notation. Message formats defined with in IEEE 11073-20601 can coexist with messages defined in other standard application profiles defined in the ISO/IEEE 11073 series of standards.

Communication

for IEEE 11073-10441 supports point to point communication between sensor nodes and BSN coordinator in star topology. For each logical point to point communication the dynamic system behavior is defined under IEEE 11073-20601. Cardiovascular fitness and activity monitor directly use the attributes and procedures for communication defined in this standard except the nomenclature Communication model describes Association procedure, Configuring procedure, Operating procedure and Time synchronization. Communication protocol stack describes association, configuration, transmission and time synchronization for communication model of cardiovascular activity and fitness monitoring system. The application layer is covered by IEEE 11073-20601 and bottom layers are described under ZigBee standard for short range wireless communication.

model

Conclusion
To conclude the following can be said, Wireless sensors have an immense potential in the field of medicine. A sensor embedded in the human body can be useful in many ways like retinal prosthesis, cancer detection, blood glucose level monitoring etc. There are a number of constraints on the sensors components like material, size, power consumption etc. The design of wireless sensors is a critical step in enabling their use in medicine.

RF power used for transmission of information certainly have some health related issue but as the perceived value related to personal communication and entertainment is increasing, personal area networks (PANs) are gaining popularity and even ready to provide healthcare monitoring solutions.

Conclusion

Currently, there are intensive activities worldwide on applying Information and Communication Technologies in a more active and direct way to support medical and healthcare services. BSN solutions are now ready to enter into the harsher world of commercial applications from the soft academic research environment. It is expected that IEEE standards like Body Area Network (IEEE 802.15.6), ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) and Cardiovascular Activity and Fitness Monitor(IEEE 1107310441) will surely lead to the development of cost effective personal health devices for millions of people.

Thank You

Questions

References

G.-Z. Yang, Body Sensor Networks. Springer, New York, NY, USA, 2006. K. Sohrabi, D. Minoli and T. Znati, Wireless Sensor Networks, Wiley, Hobuken, New Jersy, USA, 2007. B. Lo and G. Z. Yang, Key technical challenges and current implementations of body sensor networks, in Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Body Sensor Networks (BSN '05), pp. 1-5, April 2005. A. Astrin, Closing Report for the TG6 Session in March 2010. IEEE P802.15 Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs), IEEE P802.15-10-0217-00-0006, March-2010. ZigBee Allaince Home Page, http://www.zigbee.org

References

X. Hu, J. Wang, Q. Yu, W. Liu and J. Qin, A Wireless Sensor Network Based on ZigBee for Telemedicine Monitoring System, in Proceedings of International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (ICBBE-08), pp-1367-1370, Shanghai, China, May 2008. The World Health Report 2007: Prevention Geneva, World Health Organization, 2007. of Cardiovascular Disease.

M. A. Hanson, H. C. Powell, A. T. Barth, K. Ringgenberg, B. H. Calhoun, J. H. Aylor, and J. Lach,.Body Area Sensor Networks: Challenges and Opportunities, IEEE Computer Society Magazine, Vol. 42 No. 1, pp. 58-65, January 2009. ISO/IEEE 11073-20601: Health informatics Personal health device communication Part 20601: Application profile Optimized exchange protocol, First edition, 2010-05-01.

References

Chipcon Smart RF CC2420 Transceiver data sheet.

2.4

GHz

IEEE

802.15.4/ZigBee-ready

RF

W. Lars and S. Sana, Architecture concept of a wireless body area sensor network for health monitoring of elderly people, in Proceedingsof the4th IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC '07), Las Vegas, Nev, USA, January 2007. H. Ren, M. Meng and X. Chen, Physiological Information Acquisition through Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network, in Proceedings of IEEE international conference on Information Acquisition,pp-483-488, Hong Kong, China, June-July 2008. A. Varga. OMNET++ Manual. 2009. Discrete Event Simulation System User