A wireless sensor network approach to enable location awareness in ubiquitous healthcare applications

In this paper, we outline the research issues that we are pursuing towards building of location aware environments for mainly ubiquitous healthcare applications. Such location aware application can provide what is happening in this space. To locate an object, such as patient or elderly person, the active ceiling-mounted reference beacons were placed throughout the building. Reference beacons periodically publish location information on RF and ultrasonic signals to allow application running on mobile or static nodes to study and determine their physical location. Once object-carried passive listener receives the information, it subsequently determines it's location from reference beacons. The cost of the system was reduced while the accuracy in our experiments was fairly good and fine grained between 7 and 12 cm for location awareness in indoor environments by using only the sensor nodes and wireless sensor network technology. Passive architecture used here provides the security of the user privacy while at the server the privacy was secured by providing the authentication using Geopriv approach. This information from sensor nodes is further forwarded to base station where further computation is performed to determine the current position of object.