4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)

Intelligent Hospitals based on IOT

Syed Nisar Bukhari
Ummer Iqbal Muneer Ahmad Dar National Institute of Electronics and
National Institute of Electronics and National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology, J & k
Information Technology, J & k Information Technology, J & k

Abstract—Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is the technology substantially raised, giving the hospital a lot of new intelligent
appropriate for modern buildings, homes and public features.
infrastructure. The WSN is recognized as one of the technological
corner stone of AmI. This paper proposes the design of a WSN This paper proposes various design aspects related to
based multi-Communication standard network for the intelligent implementation of WSN based hospital environs health
monitoring of the fragile hospital environment. The proposed monitoring system. The proposed system employs the use of
network includes sensor nodes to monitor air quality, water the most modern sensors to monitor air quality, water quality,
quality and crowd inflow inside various hospital buildings across noise, crowd etc. in various hospitals across the state of J&K.
the state of J&K. The outcome would be a system composed of The sensor data collected from hospitals would be securely
ad-hoc sensor nodes providing the hospital administration with transferred to a local base station system. The base station at
adequate non intrusive and intelligent monitoring to improve the each hospital is connected to a central database through the
quality of hospital hygiene, cleanliness and sanitation. The Internet cloud. The local base station would provide the
proposed design integrates WSN with packet switched networks/ hospital-health information to the local hospital
web service communication into a knowledge and information administration. The central database can be interfaced with a
service platform. Such a platform can support health web application to provide the status of the all hospitals.
administrators/ managers to improve the quality of ambient
surroundings of hospitals. II. MOTIVATION
Keywords—Ambient Intelligence; WSN; Base-Station;TinyOS Words like odour, waste and pollution are almost synonymous
with hospitals of India in general and J&K in particular. Waste
I. INTRODUCTION materials speckled all around, crowded wards and waiting
Hospitals play a key role in supporting human survival and rooms are a grim reminder of the unhygienic condition of our
health standards. But these critical pillars of life support are health institutions. This is also a common scenario at J&Ks
also prone to various dangers both intentional and major health institutions, which has become a cause of worry
unintentional like fire, pollution, contamination, noise etc. In for patients and doctors. The motivation to choose this
order to make these temple’s of health fit for their purpose, application for WSN and AmI integration is two folds. The
effective mechanisms are needed to better monitor their biologists involved value the possibility to monitor the
ambient behavior. hospital environment inconspicuously, while for the
Revolution in sensor technology has made it possible to technologists, they saw an opportunity to analyze the vision of
quantify any measureable characteristics of ambient WSN security in a real application. AmI and emergence of
phenomenon. Today we have line of sensors to measure air new computing devices, advances in sensor networking, smart
quality (Smoke, odor, suspended particles), water quality (pH, sensors and other devices gives us the methods to come up
palatability etc) and other physical phenomenon. Sensors can with novel applications to better assist healthcare sector in
be employed to count events (to count people, vehicles or general and its dependents in particular. We believe that
other events). These Sensors are available in various form people residing in hospitals are the ones who need the cleanest
factors and hence can be deployed across the range of air to breath, palatable water to drink and a feasible
surroundings. Due to the advances in sensor technology in environment that assists to their health recovery.
recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have .
extensively been employed for environmental monitoring,
health monitoring and industrial monitoring [1] . WSNs can be III. RECENT ADVANCES
used to monitor delicate environments and can prove vital to Environmental monitoring through sensor networks has
prevent environmental degradation by alerting the authorities evolved over time and improved in many studies [2] [3] . As a
about the possibility of a disaster. Although sensor networks large scale sensor network deployment, Habitat monitoring
have been utilized for numerous environmental monitoring system was developed using one hundred motes [4]. The
tasks but their potential to monitor complex indoor habitats system was deployed to observe the effect of microclimatic
like hospitals has not been analyzed so far. By integrating changes on seabird nests. Citysee [5], is a Co2 monitoring
WSN devices in the hospital environment, the level of system designed for monitoring Co2 levels in an urban area in
protection against pollution, infections etc could be China. This paper mainly focuses on sensor node deployment

978-1-5386-4606-9©2018 IEEE
4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)

problem. In [6], an air pollution monitoring system was Count Sensors are deployed at all the hospital entrances to
implemented in outdoor setup. Various sensor devices were keep a count on number of hospital visitors present at a
set up and sensor monitored data were transmitted to the particular point of time. In the proposed design nodes will
server. The server after doing some calculations based on the work independently and transmit the collected sensor
domain knowledge transmits the signal to an alarm system. parameters wirelessly over a WSN network towards the base
The IEEE 1451 is a set of smart transducer interface standards station system. These nodes are programmed to work
developed to increase the interoperability and speed up the collectively to form a multi-hop network. The nodes do
expansion of smart sensors and actuators usage within the area participate and exchange routing information to establish best
of wired and wireless network. ”Casattenta” [7] is the possible route towards the base-station so that the sensor data
demonstrator of a research project on ”Ambient Intelligence”, can be routed to the base-station via multiple hops.
“Sensor Fusion” and “Wireless Sensor Networks”. The system
which is based on Zigbee wireless protocol consists of fixed
smart sensors distributed in the environment and wearable
ones monitoring inhabitant’s health and activity. [10] presents
a simplest air quality monitoring module based on CAN
(Controller Area Network) protocol. Sensor nodes consist of
CAN transceiver and CAN controller. Each node is interfaced
with VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) sensors,
continuously monitoring environment and putting sensor data
into CAN bus. Although the above discussed works all
implement the environment monitoring, but most of them are
outdoor systems with emphasis mainly on deployment and
network feasibility in real time. However for indoor
environments like hospitals, various key issues like security,
sensor technology and usability have seldom been analyzed. In
this paper, we aim to propose a WSN based multi-
communication monitoring system with emphasis on the
aforementioned issues.[8] suggested a method for mining of
raw data of the in the usage of the IOT in healthcare
monitoring .[9] suggests efficient architecture models and
access control algorithms for IoT-based E-health systems Fig. 1. Proposed Architecture

IV. DESIGN APPROACH The base-station node is specially programmed

The proposed secure ambient intelligent monitoring (TOSBASE application) to act as Gateway between the WSN
system based on WSN is illustrated in fig. 1. It is comprised and the Packet switched network. The base Station node is
of three tiers: monitoring sensor nodes, local base station node connected to a base-station system that hosts a visualization
and remote monitoring centre. The proposed design and analysis application. This application can provide vital
encompasses the facilities of various hospitals across the state real time hospital health information to the concerned
of J&K. At each hospital building a large number of different administration which can initiate a response to control the
types of sensor nodes (known as motes) silently deployed. A ambient parameters of the hospital. The base-station systems
sensor node or a mote has sensing, processing and at every hospital facility further transfers the local hospital
communicating capabilities. These minimally invasive motes data to a global database via an Internet cloud setup. The
are spread and placed at various locations across the hospital Remote monitoring center accesses the global database to
structure and are transparent to the general public. The sensor provide the real-time status of all the hospitals which could be
position is to be chosen in a manner that leads to the accurate put to use by the general health administration.
measurement of the concerned parameters. The The proposed architecture would employ mote works
heterogeneous set of sensors includes but is not limited to platform. Moteworks nodes like micaz motes are 802.15.4
sensors like smoke detectors, palatability sensors, odour compliant and are based on CC2420 radio with upto 250 kbps
sensors, poisonous gas detectors, fire detectors, dissolved data rate. CC2420 uses a digital direct sequence spread
oxygen sensors, noise measurement sensors, counter sensors spectrum (DSSS) with OQPSK modulation and provides a
and many more. Fig. 2 depicts a sample sensor node layout. spreading gain of 9 dB and an effective data rate of 250 kbps [
Some of the sensor nodes like smoke detectors, odour sensors, Jan Hinrich, Vlado, 2009] . The platform offers features like
fire detectors etc need to be deployed all over the hospital self-configuring, self healing, low power, XMESH based
including the patient wards, OPD’s, Corridors, intensive care topology which requires minimal human intervention. The
units and elsewhere. The palatability sensors, dissolved XMESH employs a power efficient variant of Adhoc Distance
oxygen sensors etc can be immersed in the water tanks that are Vector Routing Protocol (AODV) to identify the best possible
the sources of the drinking water distribution system. route from an end node to the base station node. These motes
Poisonous gas detectors and odour sensors can be deployed at are tinyOS based and hence are custom programmable using
locations like garbage collection points, laboratories, kitchens embedded nesc applications. The nodes in the proposed
and many other locations where need is felt. Directional network could be programmed with intelligent applications

978-1-5386-4606-9©2018 IEEE
4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)

capable to dynamically adjust the sampling rates, manage the

duty cycles to save energy and ensure secure transmission of
messages to authenticated nodes. The base station system is V. CONCLUSION
configured with XSERVE a gateway application that logs the The design process and implementation details of a sensor
sensor data to local and global databases. network based Ambient intelligent hospital were described.
Since designing aWSN based system means working closely
with hardware. Getting a design logically right does not
guarntee that a function actually works when deployed in real
time. As a continuation to this work, tests will begin on the
physical implementation of the sensor network. A test bench
will be setup where different implementation issues will be
analysed in real time. The test bench would be employed to
test the performance of the custom authentication protocol
purposefully developed for the Low rate WSN based
monitoring systems.

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978-1-5386-4606-9©2018 IEEE