A wireless sensor network architecture and its application in an assistive environment

ABSTRACT

Today's assistive environments place pervasive technologies in the patient's living area in order to provide therapeutic or assistive type of human monitoring [13]. One type of pervasive technology commonly used is using wireless sensor motes, which can be deployed in an indoor environment.

In this paper, we propose a system architecture for placing a wireless sensor network (WSN) in a home; sensor nodes are placed into different private rooms where people are intended to live. Using photocells sensors in the nodes, our system can detect the movement of people inside of the rooms. Our system also includes a web-based interface which is used to visualize the data flow in our system in real-time. We call such a WSN implementation Assistive Home Monitoring, or AtHoM.

This paper studies how we can combine the WSNs architecture with a WWW application to create a system that can visualize the data remotely by reacting to the sensors deployed in the environment. This paper describes an architecture to integrate the Web with Wireless Sensor Networks for an assistive environment and how it was implemented in the context of experiments. We provide a detailed description of the architecture of the AtHoM system we designed by basing our experiments on a real-world apartment, the Heracleia Apartment., that exists inside our laboratory, the Human Centered Computing Lab. We describe two different experiments implemented within the Heracleia apartment. The aim of these experiments is to validate localization algorithms and all related measurements.

From the first experiment and the two subsequent applications we implemented in our apartment test bed, we found that the integration of WWW and WSNs can make the sharing of data collected by WSNs easier for people to access and visualize.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.0 GENERAL

  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

General Terms:
Documentation, Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement

Keywords:
assistive environment, web applet, web sensor networks, wireless sensor networks