Workshop on Smart Homes for Tele-Health (SMARTEL) 2010

Recent advances in the wireless sensor network (WSN) technology has led to several potential applications in the health care industry. One such application is “Smart Monitoring” where smart devices can remotely monitor a patient’s vital signs as well as other contextual information. In this regard the Smart Monitoring System consists of traditional health care sensors such as EKG, blood pressure, pulse-oximeter and glucose meter as well as other sensors for recording the contextual information such as motion, temperature, light, humidity etc. The patient’s medical and contextual information can be locally processed and automatically transmitted to the relevant health-care staff, or they can be handled locally in the homes. These smart devices can assist in knowledge extraction and filtering the unwanted data. The quality of current health care system can be significantly improved by using these smart devices. The realization of Smart Monitoring is technically challenging as it involves many research areas such as wearable computing, context-awareness, sensor data fusion, security and privacy, reliable communication protocols, decision support systems and user-friendly interfaces. Although significant progress has been made in last few years, however, more work is needed to for the pragmatic realization of this technology.