Integration of WSN and Barcode Technology in M-Health Surveillance System

Abstract

The main goal of this research is to provide an affordable, flexible and comprehensive mobile healthcare (m-healthcare) solution to the chronic diseases out-patient who needs to undergo long term medication and treatment processes. M-healthcare surveillance system has been a prevalent solution to overcome the poor mobility of traditional PC desktop based healthcare surveillance system. Healthcare monitoring scheme based on wireless terminal are proposed to move healthcare from clinical-centered to patient-centered, enable healthcare to be done at home, not only fix at hospital settings. In conjunction with the growth and widespread of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology, applications that involved with sensor nodes are getting renowned. Sensor nodes are applied in biomedical devices to transmit patient’s biomedical data wirelessly to the monitoring terminal. In this approach, Android smart phone with more computer-alike and user-friendly features is used as monitoring terminal to monitor chronic diseases patient’s ECG (Electrocardiography) ubiquitously under the coverage of WSN. In order to achieve for maximum mobility and flexibility in m-healthcare, design and size of sensor node used are taken into consideration during the hardware implementation. As an extension to the m-healthcare surveillance system, barcode technology is applied to implement personalized medication assistance by using the embedded camera in smart phone device as barcode decoder, to assist out-patient in medication administration and to reduce the occurrence of medical errors which is often life-death concerned. M-healthcare surveillance system with medication assistance which does not need any additional hardware devices provides a more comprehensive and affordable solution to the patients.