Mobile Gateway for Ubiquitous Health Care System Using ZigBee and Bluetooth

Abstract

A ubiquitous health care system takes the advantage of portability and small size of wireless sensor nodes to provide remote health care services and real-time health monitoring. A gateway is needed to mediate communication between a local sensor network and remote data consumers. In current implementations of ubiquitous health care systems ZigBee-based sensors are often used to gather vital sign data such as ECG and heart rate. Transferring large quantities of vital signs from a ZigBee-based sensor sink node to a gateway requires a bandwidth that ZigBee alone is not able to provide. In this paper, we present a technical design of a Bluetooth-based mobile gateway that bridges the connection between a sensor network and the Internet. Our system enables ubiquitous health care experience while providing a platform for additional services such as alarms, notifications and analysis of medical data. Controlling a sensor network from the mobile gateway is also possible. The flexible design of the system does not restrict its usage only to health care services - the gateway can be configured to work with any kind of sensor network having a sink node with Bluetooth capability.