Practical Design of A Sensor Network for Understanding Nursing Activities

We have constructed a sensor network in a real hospital environment to develop a system that prevents medical accidents by monitoring nursing activities. The network has been carefully designed to be dependable for practical purposes even in a network-unready environment with considerations of safety and stability as well as the consistency of the obtained sensor data. This paper describes the design and implementation of our sensor network. Through an experiment of about one week, we confirmed that our design performs well in a practical environment and obtains consistent data among the sensors worn by nurses and installed in the environment. Since a hospital has strict limitations on the use of sensor network equipment, the design described in this paper provides a practical solution for the construction of sensor networks in many indoor applications