Design and Fabrication of Low Power Sensor Network Platform for Ubiquitous Health Care

Recent advancement in wireless communications and electronics has enabled the development of low power sensor network. Wireless sensor network are often used in remote monitoring control applications, health care, security and environmental monitoring. Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology consisting of small, low-power, and low-cost devices that integrate limited computation, sensing, and radio communication capabilities. Sensor network platform for health care has been designed, fabricated and tested. This system consists of an embedded micro-controller, Radio Frequency (RF) transceiver, power management, I/O expansion, and serial communication (RS-232). The hardware platform uses Atmel ATmega128L 8-bit ultra low power RISC processor with 128KB flash memory as the program memory and 4KB SRAM as the data memory. The radio transceiver (Chipcon CC1000) operates in the ISM band at 433MHz or 916MHz with a maximum data rate of 76.8kbps. Also, the indoor radio range is approximately 20-30m. When many sensors have to communicate with the controller, standard communication interfaces such as Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) or Integrated Circuit ($I^{2}C$) allow sharing a single communication bus. With its low power, the smallest and low cost design, the wireless sensor network system and wireless sensing electronics to collect health-related information of human vitality and main physiological parameters (ECG, Temperature, Perspiration, Blood Pressure and some more vitality parameters, etc.)