Wireless Sensor Networks Can Save Lives – Benefits and Open Issues

摘要

Many critical situations could be avoided or at least the damages caused by them could be minimized if the indicating factors were measured and recognized early enough. Here the meaning of the term “critical situation” is very broad, including, but not limited to events related to personal health (medical) or critical infrastructure (water, electricity and information supplies). The measured parameters of the observed phenomenon and their interdependencies need to be included in the design of the monitoring system. The phenomenon defines the size and the complexity of the final system as well as the ways it interacts with the user. An example of a small and stand alone system is, for instance, the blood pressure gauge. The device needs applying the cuff, then collects the data and presents the result on the display. The user needs to know how to interpret the raw measurement result. What is important, the interpretation cannot be done without considering the context, in that exemplary case, related to the person whose blood pressure was measured. rnWith the growing number of inputs the complexity of the model grows as well. If additionally the time for the reaction is short or 24h monitoring is required, pure human driven decision is not possible anymore and some automation solutions need to be applied. Such a system consists of a network of sensors and the data processing (event detection) part. The wireless sensor network is a special case of such a system. Compared to the wired solutions the choice of the wireless one has advantages but also faces some technical problems. The talk will present some examples of wireless sensor network applications within this context.