Robust medical ad hoc sensor networks (MASN) with wavelet-based ECG data mining

Heart disease is the top elder killer in the world. To reduce the healthcare cost, it is a necessary tendency to deploy self-organized, wireless heart disease monitoring hardware/software systems. Telemedicine platform based on ad hoc interconnection of tiny ECG sensors, called medical ad hoc sensor networks (MASN), can provide a promising approach for performing low-cost, real-time, remote cardiac patient monitoring at any time. The contribution of this research is the design of a practical MASN hardware/software platform to perform real-time healthcare data collections. It has reliable, cluster-based communication scheme. Due to the radio broadcasting nature of wireless networks, a MASN has the risk of being attacked. This research also designs a low overhead medical security scheme to achieve confidential ECG data transmission in the wireless medium. Finally, our MASN system has the capability of keeping track of cardiac patients and extracting ECG features based on wavelet theories. Our MASN platform is very useful to practical medical monitoring applications. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.