Low-cost wireless system for patient monitoring

Wireless sensors networks (WSNs) became a successful alternative to cabled systems used for surveillance or monitoring, allowing more freedom to patients or elderly persons and also lower costs for implementation improving the quality of medical care. The paper presents a possible solution for a surveillance system based on a BeagleBoard-XM card, connected to a video camera and emulates the data provided by some vital signs sensors. If one or more parameters provided by sensors are out of range, the system sends images and the values of the parameters to the collector module by means of a ZigBee module connected to the acquisition node. We find that the bandwidth provided by the ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 technology may be enough for our purpose due to the computational power of the BeagleBoard platform which can optimize the amount of data sent by the wireless connection.