WPSS: Wireless Patient Surveillance System using Zigbee standards

The goal of this project is to design and implement a wireless sensing system for monitoring patient state heart rate and provide patient charts that help track the patient well-being and produce alerts and notifications for patient critical events. This is advanced technology, but it will be helpful not only in industrialised countries but also in regions of the world where hospitals do not have a wired data communication infrastructure. By the WPSS system, we present a proof-of-concept of wireless patient monitoring system. The system measures the patient heart signal and performs three major processing stages including analogue to digital conversion, heart beat detection, and communicating patient heart information between the sensors and the host central system. The WPSS system leverages the ZigBee emerging standards for communication between the sensors and the host central system. The host provides a user interface to display patient charts and provides alerts and notifications representing critical events pre-configured on the patient server subsystem PSS. WPSS has been deployed to several sensor platforms, which all use a full running ZigBee stack provided by microchip. The project undergoes four stages, namely: measurements using patient monitoring device (PMD), signal processing, communication, and analyzing. In the first stage, measuring patients’ heart signals will be performed using outfitted sensors, and fed to the patient server subsystem (PSS) as continuous analogue signals. In the second stage, analogue signals will be processed via attached low-power microcontrollers that are used for filtering, digitizing, and preparing digital signals for communication. In the third stage, patient information is transmitted through wireless interface to a server, and stored into a database. In the Final stage, the host is responsible for analyzing patient information and producing alarms reporting the patients’ critical conditions. The system architecture is shown in Figure 1.