Proposal of ZigBee Systems for the Provision of Location Information and Transmission of Sensor Data in Medical Welfare

摘要

This paper proposes a scheme to obtain location and vital health information using ZigBee system. ZigBee systems are wireless communication systems defined by IEEE 802.154. In the proposed scheme, location information is obtained using the Link Quality Indication (LQI) function of a ZigBee system, which represents the received signal strength. And, the vital health information are collected from the electrocardiogram monitor, the pulse and blood pressure device, attached to the patient’s body. This information is then transmitted to an outside network by ZigBee systems. In this way, vital health information can be transmitted as ZigBee sensor data while patients with the ZigBee terminal are moving. In the experiments using actual ZigBee devices, the proposed scheme could obtain accurate location and vital health information from the sensor data. Moreover, to achieve high reliability in the actual service, the collected amount of sensor data was confirmed by the theoretic calculation, when a ZigBee terminal passed through ZigBee routers. These results indicate that the proposed scheme can be used to detect the accurate location of the ZigBee terminal. And over 99% of the sensor data on vital health information was obtained when the ZigBee terminal passed through approximately four ZigBee routers.