Low Power Wide Area Networks (lpwan): Technology Review And Experimental Study on Mobility Effect

HEALTHCARE MONITORING

Health care monitoring and Health applications is one of the places where a sensor network can help in saving lives and also making the healthcare experience much peaceful for patients and their patients. Some of the benefits of using sensor networks for healthcare monitoring are :

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  Monitor every patients support system and raise an alarm in realtime in case of emergencies [7].
  
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  Real time monitoring of location of critical equipment in the hospital.
  
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  Monitoring the location of Doctors, hospital staff, patients or their family members so that they can be reached out in critical situations.
  
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  Real time data of patients vitals [21].
  

In this system we plan to monitor the state of stationary objects as well as people in motion inside a closed environment. Hence we use the mobility and non-mobility results from our indoor experiments to study the precautions we need to take while designing a healthcare monitoring system.

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  Quality of Service : The Quality of Service of a LPWAN application cannot be compromised as it can be a matter of life and death for the patient. It can be seen from our results that both the end to end delay and packet loss rates increase as mobility speed increases.
  
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  Location of gateway : Since the location of gateway is fixed while a sensor attached to a patient might move across different rooms or also different buildings, it is very important to consider the effect of walls in an indoor environment as we can conclude from our results that under mobility conditions LPWAN shows degraded performance in an indoor environment.
  
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  Data size : In cases where a sensor is tracking multiple information about the patient, the data packet size being send increases. It can be seen from our results that as the data packet size increases, it does increases the end to end delay thus affecting the quality of service of the network.
  
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  Varying movement speed : A patient being tracked can be moving at different speeds when he is just taking a walk or being rushed to a surgery. In both cases the network performance will be different as at higher speeds the network performance is affected drastically.
  

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