Towards a Self-Organizing Wireless Hospital Area Network.

Wireless networks and hand-held devices are permanently evolving and becoming a more effective alternative to actual network technologies and applications that are used by the health service providers. We envision a Hospital Area Network (HAN) that is formed mainly using WLAN and Zigbee. A Zigbee sensor network of wearable health monitoring devices, medical equipments and PDA's is formed enabling the hospital staff to be connected to their critical systems independent of their location in the medical facility. However, to take advantage of the high mobility enabled by the wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the HAN application, a series of problems have to be solved, like: choosing a good abstraction level to work with the WSN (e.g. appropriate middleware), design software that increases interoperability between heterogeneous medical devices, design hardware that are energy efficient and miniaturized, find techniques and algorithms that are appropriate for an increasing complexity, dynamic and ad-hoc behavior of the network. In this paper, we will tackle some of these problems and refer to hardware and software aspects. On the hardware side, the low power Zigbee-ready motes are suggested as the hardware platform for on the body medical sensor nodes and medical devices. On the software side, the OSA+ II middleware that scales down to the miniaturized medical sensor nodes and that allows a good interoperability between them is explained. Then, we will show how organic computing can be used in HAN. Organic computing consists of techniques and principles used in nature, like: self-organization that can be applied for building an HAN that is easy to deploy and flexible to adapt for hospital specific situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]