Wireless sensor networks for biomedical applications

Biomedical wireless sensor networks empowers the development of new applications and services to improve the quality of medical care provided to the citizens. In such context, these networks need to be integrated on the existing network infrastructure and information systems and, at the same time, guarantee high levels of quality of service. These requirements of quality of service must be addressed on the project and development stages and monitored during the network operation. On the project stage, the requirements of quality of service must be identified and accurately characterised; on the development stage, it is necessary to implement the mechanisms that ensure its accomplishment; finally, during the network operation, it is crucial to monitor the network to evaluate its performance and manage the admission of new nodes. Another important issue related with biomedical wireless sensor networks is the network lifetime, designed to be as long as possible. This work discusses these topics and presents some achievements on the evaluation of the quality of service at the development time, on the real-time monitoring of the network performance at run time, as well as on network lifetime extension.