Sensor Networks in Pervasive Healthcare Computing

Advances in wireless sensor networking (WSN) have opened up new opportunities in distributed informatics. Pervasive healthcare, based on WSN, is an emerging technology area with great potential of future applicability. Small size devices capable of sensing, computing and communicating, enable pervasive platforms; while opening up the large number of technical, medical, social and ethical questions and challenges. Though mostly focused on technical issues, this chapter also addresses some non-technical aspects implied by the technology implementation in medicine. It presents the general philosophy of the pervasive computing and technical design space of wireless sensor networks, mostly highlighting: the energy conservation, communication aspects, security, and software implementation. The state of the art in ubiquitous healthcare, challenges, open questions, as well as the non-technical aspects of the systems implementation are also presented here. As such, this chapter intends to give an insight on most important WSN-based pervasive computing issues, the multidisciplinary application-driven design of these systems, and their position in healthcare pervasive computing.