CAREER: CodeBlue: A Wireless Sensor Network Infrastructure for Medical Applications

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This CAREER project is developing a wireless sensor network infrastructure for medical care applications. Sensor networks have the potential for enormous impact on many aspects of medical care. In a hospital or clinic, outfitting every patient with wireless vital sign sensors will allow doctors and nurses to continuously monitor the status of their patients. In an emergency scenario, the same technology enables medics to care for large numbers of casualties. This project involves the development of a robust, scalable software platform for medical sensor networks, called CodeBlue, which provides protocols for device discovery, publish/subscribe multihop routing, and a query interface allowing caregivers to request data from groups of patients. CodeBlue is focused on addressing the challenges of robustness and scalability of large networks of wireless medical sensors. With limited radio bandwidth, highly variable data rates, and a broad range of reliability requirements for medical sensors, it is necessary to develop techniques that can tune the bandwidth and data quality delivered by the network. This project is developing a suite of small, wireless, wearable medical sensors; adaptive, cross-layer approaches to quality-of-service and congestion management; and techniques for analyzing and fusing data across multiple patient sensors. The research undertaken through this project will have significant impact on the development of future medical sensing technologies. In collaboration with several hospitals and medical research groups, this project is evaluating the CodeBlue system in real clinical settings, including large-scale disaster response, monitoring stroke patient rehabilitation, and understanding the effects of medication on Parkinson's Disease.