While handy wireless Internet appliances are increasingly important part of our lives, portable medical monitors are far from handy for everyday use. A wearable physiological monitoring device usually includes bundles of wires connecting sensors and the monitoring device using a Personal Area Network (PAN). This system organization is unsuitable for longer and continuous monitoring, particularly during normal activity. For instance, monitoring of athletes and computer assisted rehabilitation commonly involve unwieldy wires to arms and legs that restrain normal activity. We propose a wireless PAN of intelligent sensors as a system architecture of choice, and present a new design of wireless personal area network with physiological sensors for medical applications in Internet based telemedical environment.
We are confident that all the sensors in our personal area network should be wireless. New generations of implantable sensors (such as blood glucose monitors and drug pumps) are inherently wireless. Intelligent wireless sensors perform data acquisition and limited processing. Individual sensors monitor specific physiological signals (such as EEG, ECG, GSR, etc.) and communicate with each other and the personal server. That way we will be able to avoid wiring problems and protect patient's privacy. Personal server integrates information from different sensors and communicates with the rest of telemedical system as a standard mobile unit. We present our prototype implementation of Wireless Intelligent SEnsor (WISE) and hierarchical digital signal processing. The whole system acts as a digital "guardian angel". In future we expect all components of WISE integrated in a single chip for use in a variety of new medical applications and sophisticated human computer interfaces. Existing growth of wireless infrastructure will allow a range of new telemedical applications that will significantly improve the quality of health care, personal(izable) personal computers, computer assisted rehabilitation, environmental and battlefield monitoring, affective computing, and many new other applications.