Motivation – Health Monitoring anytime, anywhere ...

Communication is an important part in the design of the personal health monitoring system. The personal health monitoring system has to support a complete surveillance of the vital parameters without reducing the mobility of the patient. Just with the combination of the with each other communicating sub-systems (sensor, base station, and database) this task is possible to achieve.

Communication environments

It is necessary to distinguish between the different environments when thinking off the communication process. Communication in the environment of the patient from the communication between the base station and the medical service provider:

Body Area Network (BAN) covers the communication between the wearable sensors.
The communication between the sensors and the base station takes place in the Personal Area Network (PAN).
The connection from the base station to the database system is established via a cellular communication network. Thus, authorized users (medical doctors, patient) can access the patient data by a secure internet connection.

The data transmission in the BAN can either be achieved with in the clothes integrated cable connections or via a low-power short area cellular connection.

Personal Area Network

It is tried to stick to available medical and information technology standards when designing the communication platform. Nevertheless, several requirements do exists in the home monitoring environment, which results in a design of an own communication protocol:

Interoperability
Self configurating devices (Plug & Play)
Mobile ad hoc networking
Security, connection, and power management

The realization of this functionality is gathered by the use of the communication protocol PANAMA (Personal Area Networking for Advanced Medical Applications) which is based on the cellular communication standard Bluetooth (TM). With this, self configuration and application identification is possible. By using existing Bluetooth profiles, a simple integration of existing devices is possible. The internet connection as an example is either established via a Bluetooth capable mobile phone (in a mobile environment) ore via a Bluetooth access point (at home, at the doctor, or at the hospital).

The communication protocol will be unveiled when the specifications are completed. A further standardization is desired.

Integration in existing systems

Sensors and systems of other companies may be easily integrated into the PHMon system. Therefor, a miniaturized communication module for the integration into existing systems is provided as well as a software component for PC based systems. To demonstrate the simple integration process, a electronic scale of the project partner Beurer will be shown on the Medica 2002 in Düsseldorf/Germany.

With the integration of additional sensors, a individual personal health monitoring system for each patient can be set up.