4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)
Intelligent Hospitals based on IOT
Ummer Iqbal Muneer Ahmad Dar
National Institute of Electronics and National Institute of Electronics and
Information Technology, J & k Information Technology, J & k
Abstract—Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is the technology
appropriate for modern buildings, homes and public
infrastructure. The WSN is recognized as one of the technological
corner stone of AmI. This paper proposes the design of a WSN
based multi-Communication standard network for the intelligent
monitoring of the fragile hospital environment. The proposed
network includes sensor nodes to monitor air quality, water
quality and crowd inflow inside various hospital buildings across
the state of J&K. The outcome would be a system composed of
ad-hoc sensor nodes providing the hospital administration with
adequate non intrusive and intelligent monitoring to improve the
quality of hospital hygiene, cleanliness and sanitation. The
proposed design integrates WSN with packet switched networks/
web service communication into a knowledge and information
service platform. Such a platform can support health
administrators/ managers to improve the quality of ambient
surroundings of hospitals.
Keywords—Ambient Intelligence; WSN; Base-Station;TinyOS
I. INTRODUCTION
Hospitals play a key role in supporting human survival and
health standards. But these critical pillars of life support are
also prone to various dangers both intentional and
unintentional like fire, pollution, contamination, noise etc. In
order to make these temple’s of health fit for their purpose,
effective mechanisms are needed to better monitor their
ambient behavior.
Revolution in sensor technology has made it possible to
quantify any measureable characteristics of ambient
phenomenon. Today we have line of sensors to measure air
quality (Smoke, odor, suspended particles), water quality (pH,
palatability etc) and other physical phenomenon. Sensors can
be employed to count events (to count people, vehicles or
other events). These Sensors are available in various form
factors and hence can be deployed across the range of
surroundings. Due to the advances in sensor technology in
recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have
extensively been employed for environmental monitoring,
health monitoring and industrial monitoring [1] . WSNs can be
used to monitor delicate environments and can prove vital to
prevent environmental degradation by alerting the authorities
about the possibility of a disaster. Although sensor networks
have been utilized for numerous environmental monitoring
tasks but their potential to monitor complex indoor habitats
like hospitals has not been analyzed so far. By integrating
WSN devices in the hospital environment, the level of
protection against pollution, infections etc could be
978-1-5386-4606-9©2018 IEEE
Syed Nisar Bukhari
National Institute of Electronics and
Information Technology, J & k
substantially raised, giving the hospital a lot of new intelligent
features.
This paper proposes various design aspects related to
implementation of WSN based hospital environs health
monitoring system. The proposed system employs the use of
the most modern sensors to monitor air quality, water quality,
noise, crowd etc. in various hospitals across the state of J&K.
The sensor data collected from hospitals would be securely
transferred to a local base station system. The base station at
each hospital is connected to a central database through the
Internet cloud. The local base station would provide the
hospital-health information to the local hospital
administration. The central database can be interfaced with a
web application to provide the status of the all hospitals.
II. MOTIVATION
Words like odour, waste and pollution are almost synonymous
with hospitals of India in general and J&K in particular. Waste
materials speckled all around, crowded wards and waiting
rooms are a grim reminder of the unhygienic condition of our
health institutions. This is also a common scenario at J&Ks
major health institutions, which has become a cause of worry
for patients and doctors. The motivation to choose this
application for WSN and AmI integration is two folds. The
biologists involved value the possibility to monitor the
hospital environment inconspicuously, while for the
technologists, they saw an opportunity to analyze the vision of
WSN security in a real application. AmI and emergence of
new computing devices, advances in sensor networking, smart
sensors and other devices gives us the methods to come up
with novel applications to better assist healthcare sector in
general and its dependents in particular. We believe that
people residing in hospitals are the ones who need the cleanest
air to breath, palatable water to drink and a feasible
environment that assists to their health recovery.
.
III. RECENT ADVANCES
Environmental monitoring through sensor networks has
evolved over time and improved in many studies [2] [3] . As a
large scale sensor network deployment, Habitat monitoring
system was developed using one hundred motes [4]. The
system was deployed to observe the effect of microclimatic
changes on seabird nests. Citysee [5], is a Co2 monitoring
system designed for monitoring Co2 levels in an urban area in
China. This paper mainly focuses on sensor node deployment
4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)
problem. In [6], an air pollution monitoring system was
implemented in outdoor setup. Various sensor devices were
set up and sensor monitored data were transmitted to the
server. The server after doing some calculations based on the
domain knowledge transmits the signal to an alarm system.
The IEEE 1451 is a set of smart transducer interface standards
developed to increase the interoperability and speed up the
expansion of smart sensors and actuators usage within the area
of wired and wireless network. ”Casattenta” [7] is the
demonstrator of a research project on ”Ambient Intelligence”,
“Sensor Fusion” and “Wireless Sensor Networks”. The system
which is based on Zigbee wireless protocol consists of fixed
smart sensors distributed in the environment and wearable
ones monitoring inhabitant’s health and activity. [10] presents
a simplest air quality monitoring module based on CAN
(Controller Area Network) protocol. Sensor nodes consist of
CAN transceiver and CAN controller. Each node is interfaced
with VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) sensors,
continuously monitoring environment and putting sensor data
into CAN bus. Although the above discussed works all
implement the environment monitoring, but most of them are
outdoor systems with emphasis mainly on deployment and
network feasibility in real time. However for indoor
environments like hospitals, various key issues like security,
sensor technology and usability have seldom been analyzed. In
this paper, we aim to propose a WSN based multi-
communication monitoring system with emphasis on the
aforementioned issues.[8] suggested a method for mining of
raw data of the in the usage of the IOT in healthcare
monitoring .[9] suggests efficient architecture models and
access control algorithms for IoT-based E-health systems
IV. DESIGN APPROACH
The proposed secure ambient intelligent monitoring
system based on WSN is illustrated in fig. 1. It is comprised
of three tiers: monitoring sensor nodes, local base station node
and remote monitoring centre. The proposed design
encompasses the facilities of various hospitals across the state
of J&K. At each hospital building a large number of different
types of sensor nodes (known as motes) silently deployed. A
sensor node or a mote has sensing, processing and
communicating capabilities. These minimally invasive motes
are spread and placed at various locations across the hospital
structure and are transparent to the general public. The sensor
position is to be chosen in a manner that leads to the accurate
measurement of the concerned parameters. The
heterogeneous set of sensors includes but is not limited to
sensors like smoke detectors, palatability sensors, odour
sensors, poisonous gas detectors, fire detectors, dissolved
oxygen sensors, noise measurement sensors, counter sensors
and many more. Fig. 2 depicts a sample sensor node layout.
Some of the sensor nodes like smoke detectors, odour sensors,
fire detectors etc need to be deployed all over the hospital
including the patient wards, OPD’s, Corridors, intensive care
units and elsewhere. The palatability sensors, dissolved
oxygen sensors etc can be immersed in the water tanks that are
the sources of the drinking water distribution system.
Poisonous gas detectors and odour sensors can be deployed at
locations like garbage collection points, laboratories, kitchens
and many other locations where need is felt. Directional
978-1-5386-4606-9©2018 IEEE
Count Sensors are deployed at all the hospital entrances to
keep a count on number of hospital visitors present at a
particular point of time. In the proposed design nodes will
work independently and transmit the collected sensor
parameters wirelessly over a WSN network towards the base
station system. These nodes are programmed to work
collectively to form a multi-hop network. The nodes do
participate and exchange routing information to establish best
possible route towards the base-station so that the sensor data
can be routed to the base-station via multiple hops.
Fig. 1. Proposed Architecture
The base-station node is specially programmed
(TOSBASE application) to act as Gateway between the WSN
and the Packet switched network. The base Station node is
connected to a base-station system that hosts a visualization
and analysis application. This application can provide vital
real time hospital health information to the concerned
administration which can initiate a response to control the
ambient parameters of the hospital. The base-station systems
at every hospital facility further transfers the local hospital
data to a global database via an Internet cloud setup. The
Remote monitoring center accesses the global database to
provide the real-time status of all the hospitals which could be
put to use by the general health administration.
The proposed architecture would employ mote works
platform. Moteworks nodes like micaz motes are 802.15.4
compliant and are based on CC2420 radio with upto 250 kbps
data rate. CC2420 uses a digital direct sequence spread
spectrum (DSSS) with OQPSK modulation and provides a
spreading gain of 9 dB and an effective data rate of 250 kbps [
Jan Hinrich, Vlado, 2009] . The platform offers features like
self-configuring, self healing, low power, XMESH based
topology which requires minimal human intervention. The
XMESH employs a power efficient variant of Adhoc Distance
Vector Routing Protocol (AODV) to identify the best possible
route from an end node to the base station node. These motes
are tinyOS based and hence are custom programmable using
embedded nesc applications. The nodes in the proposed
network could be programmed with intelligent applications
4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical, Electronics, Information, Communication and Bio-Informatics (AEEICB-18)

capable to dynamically adjust the sampling rates, manage the

duty cycles to save energy and ensure secure transmission of
messages to authenticated nodes. The base station system is
configured with XSERVE a gateway application that logs the
sensor data to local and global databases.
V. CONCLUSION
The design process and implementation details of a sensor
network based Ambient intelligent hospital were described.
Since designing aWSN based system means working closely
with hardware. Getting a design logically right does not
guarntee that a function actually works when deployed in real
time. As a continuation to this work, tests will begin on the
physical implementation of the sensor network. A test bench
will be setup where different implementation issues will be
analysed in real time. The test bench would be employed to
test the performance of the custom authentication protocol
purposefully developed for the Low rate WSN based
monitoring systems.

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