Robust body sensor network for connected health

With the growing demand for continuous and remote patient monitoring, connected health care model is becoming a norm for today's health care solutions. Connected health is a health care model to monitor patients remotely using technology. It is viewed as a proponent for mitigating health care costs and enhancing the quality of life of individuals. In the past decade, there has been remarkable growth in technology to bolster the efforts for remote patient monitoring. The contribution of this dissertation is a cost effective, low power and ubiquitous robust patient monitoring systems. Design, development, implementation and evaluation of a comprehensive health care platform that can be applied to different scenarios such as homes, hospitals and ambulatory environments have been described. This integrated health care platform is made possible with the help of wireless sensor nodes built in-house interfacing to personal health and medical monitoring devices, essentially forming a body area network with sensors / medical devices positioned around the person being monitored, thus providing a complete unified end-to-end anytime and anywhere connectivity solution. For these radio communication systems, the antennas are essential components as they are responsible for effective communication with other devices on body or off body in the wireless network. The performance characteristics of four antenna types placed at different locations on the human body have been investigated. A numerical analysis to understand and characterize the interaction of the human body tissues on the performance of these antennas has been presented. A path loss propagation model to accurately characterize the RF propagation links for optimal radio communication systems by incorporating the spatial dependence of the antennas at all angular directions has been presented. A flexible antenna on low loss substrate has been designed and fabricated for use with body sensor networks. Performance parameters of the antenna have been examined. Path loss and packet error rate measurements to understand the link characteristics of the designed antenna have been conducted. The results discussed in this dissertation are preliminary results that clearly demonstrate the necessity for performing research to understand the factors that influence the performance of body sensor networks.