| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 電腦與通訊研究所 === 96 === As people grow older, they depend more heavily upon external support for health assessment and medical care services. The current healthcare infrastructure in Taiwan area is widely considered to be inadequate to satisfy the needs of an increasingly aging population. Aging in place is one solution to ensure that the elderly can live safely and independently at their houses and in public places near their residences (generally called as living community) for as long as possible. Pervasive health monitoring is a technological approach which helps people age in place by wireless monitoring and by lastingly or regularly providing key physiological information to healthcare providers.
In this dissertation, a pervasive community-care service networking infrastructure, consisting of a home-based and a public place-based wireless physiological monitoring network, is proposed for personal health monitoring. The whole network infrastructure is mainly based on wireless mobile communication network technologies and over the existing wired broadband network as the transmission backbone. It is aimed to provide pervasive healthcare services to the elderly and the chronic patients who live at home.
For home physiological monitoring, it is necessary to continuously monitor the elder''s physiological parameters, such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and blood pressure (BP), to effectively prevent and control the health condition or even to provide urgent treatment or care while an emergency, such as the abnormal variation of heart rate (HR), occurs. To this end, a wireless in-home physiological monitoring network, based on multi-hop relay communications, which can ubiquitously and lastingly monitor the elder''s physiological data at any time or any place at home without space limit and the dead spot, is presented and designed. For emergency response handling, furthermore, an emergency alert service mechanism using short message service (SMS) is also added to the home gateway for emergency care and rescue services. Moreover, in order to assure the timeliness of transmitting the physiological data, the network latency analysis in data forwarding stage is also investigated in detail.
However the elderly may go away from their homes to frequently visited public places nearby. In order to further support pervasive and long-term care services, a cable access point (CAP) based public health monitoring network, composed of wireless local area network (WLAN) and cable television (CATV) network, is presented and developed for monitoring physiological data. The key CAP device is consisted of a cable modem (CM) and a WLAN access point (AP) to be integrated inside the chassis of an existing outdoor CATV trunk amplifier for outdoor deployment. The main purpose of the CAP device is to effectively extend the coverage of outdoor wireless access link and to further provide a data access-efficient service for constructing a ubiquitous healthcare service networking environment, especially in communities or in metropolitan area.
The proposed pervasive community-care service network infrastructure including both the home-based and the public place-based healthcare monitoring networks has been implemented and tested for physiological monitoring. The experimental results successfully validate the functions and feasibility of the proposed network.
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