Camera-Based Wireless Sensor Networks for E-Health

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely applied in many fields such as e-health, military, surveillance and industrial applications. In e-health field, WSN is commonly used for monitoring elderly people, babies , and patients The progress of WSN technologies allowed the connection of a camera to WSN node to transfer images and video. This technology improves the monitoring of patients and gives more information which is not available with traditional WSN nodes. The problem with image and video transmission is the high demand of bandwidth and the requirements of human monitoring at the sever side. In this research , images captured by WSN nodes are analysed at the node side and only special images are transferred indicating special patient activities. This reduces the required bandwidth and reduce the human effort the server side. Image processing algorithm are optimized to be suitable for the low computation power and memory resources in the WSN camera node.

Keywords: WSN – E-Health – Motion detection- Image processing