A Universal PAN Architecture for Monitoring Multiple Chronic Conditions

People living with chronic medical conditions need regular and personalised care. Mobile healthcare, synergies of mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies, provides services for the patient's vital signs to be monitored outside the clinical environment.Bluetooth wireless communication technology has been widely used in healthcare sector as cable replacement. ZigBee, an emerging ultra-low power wireless technology, has the potential to monitor multiple vital signs and environmental parameters. Bluetooth and ZigBee are envisioned as two important wireless technologies in patient monitoring. Some research projects have demonstrated the application of these two technologies in healthcare.However, until now Bluetooth and ZigBee devices can't interoperate in Bluetooth and ZigBee networks. It's expected a universal system which can accommodate these two wireless technologies is highly desirable.This project will research such a system architecture which can support Bluetooth and ZigBee technologies. The new architecture will use one set of hardware for the radio signal and other advanced signal processing and networking technologies for seamless data transmission. Several key issues will be investigated, including radio signal identification, signal demodulation, and reconfigurable modular protocol stack. The new architecture is totally software driven. The key innovation of the project is the software for signal processing and protocol stack are applied at application layer. This allows the software to be reusable and upgradeable regardless of the hardware component so as to reduce the development cost. Finally, a test bed of the new architecture will be implemented and demonstrated.