Wireless Sensor Networks for Patient Monitoring

The increasing size of the aging population, nursing staff shortages, and decreasing hospital capacities suggest that the current level of patient care may decrease in the future. Furthermore, lack of resources and communication infrastructure can also prevent care givers from saving lives in disaster response scenarios in which hospitals' emergency departments are overloaded with critical patients. In response to these challenges, the authors have assembled an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners to develop a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with the goal of automating the patient monitoring process.