On the use of the MPEG-21 framework in medical wireless sensor networks

This paper proposes a system architecture for wireless sensor network (WSN) using the MPEG-21 multimedia framework in medical applications. It has been envisioned that future hospitals will have networks comprising WSNs for low rate medical sensors as well as other network nodes supporting high rate audiovisual content. The increasing collection and variety of media content (multimedia) in such a scenario, needs a framework for the interaction with the external users regarding data filtering, meta information tagging, authentication and data rights control. Furthermore due to different user terminals and network resources, media adaptation will become important to provide reliable and robust quality of services. The MPEG-21 standard seems to have potential to meet some of the mentioned requirements. In this paper, we argue for an extension of the MPEG-21 terminology for use in biomedical wireless sensor networks and incorporate the requirements needed for medical applications. We show the architecture of a demonstration prototype based on this extended MPEG-21 framework that is under development, capable of displaying selected biomedical sensor data. The deployment of such a system may become warranted in future healthcare enterprises.