Performance evaluation of ZigBee-based wireless sensor network for monitoring patients' pulse status

Recently, the wireless sensor network has been widely deployed for medical care purpose. We have developed a wireless sensor network that can monitor the patients' pulse status for triage purpose, so that a medical team can monitor remotely the health condition of patient and they can treat the patient based on severity of patients' health condition. We developed an electronic triage operating as a sensor node (SN) tagged in patient's arm. The SN consists of microcontroller ATmega328P, ZigBee and pulse sensor to detect patient's pulse. Operating as an electronic triage, the pulse rate from sensor is classified into three categories of severe conditions, i.e., major, minor, and normal status by the microcontroller in SN and sent to the coordinator node (CN) through ZigBee interface. Our system can be deployed in emergency room, triage room, pre/post-op surgery in hospital as well as in disaster area. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of the ZigBee-based wireless sensor network that we developed. We evaluate the effective distance between CN and SN to deliver patients' pulse rate via ZigBee as well as the effective number of SNs that can be accommodated by single CN. The experimental results shown that the effective distance between CN and SN to deliver the pulse rate data is less than 30 meters and the maximum number of SNs can be accommodated by a single CN is 3 (three) nodes.