Research Article Open Access Sabzpoushan et al., Sensor Netw Data Commun 2015, 4:1 DOI: 10.4172/2090-4886.1000118 Volume 4 • Issue 1 • 1000118 Sensor Netw Data Commun ISSN: 2090-4886 SNDC, an open access journal Keywords: Healthcare; Wireless sensor network Introduction Sensor networks permit data gathering and computation to be deeply embedded in the physical environment. WSN is built by connecting a group of nodes together to perform the required tasks. Tese nodes cooperate and automatically create a network among themselves. Wireless sensor node, also commonly known as mote. Today, WSN technologies have the potential to change the way of living with many applications in industry, travel, trade, environment monitoring, medicine, care of the dependent people, and emergency management and many other areas. Wireless sensors, sensor networks, information technology (IT) and artifcial intelligence, together have built a new interdisciplinary branch of biomedical engineering in order to overcome the challenges we face in everyday life. One of the major challenges of the world is the continuous elderly population increase in the developed countries. Population reference bureau [1] forecasts that in the next 20 years, the 65-and-over population in the developed countries will be nearly 20% of the overall population. It means the need of delivering quality care to a rapidly growing population of elderly while reducing the healthcare costs is an important issue as well. One hopeful application in this area is the integration of sensing and consumer electronics technologies which would allow people to be constantly monitored. In-home pervasive networks may assist residents and their caregivers by providing continuous medical monitoring, memory enhancement, control of home appliances, medical data access, and emergency communication [2]. Continuous monitoring will increase early detection of emergency conditions and diseases for at risk patients and also provide wide range of healthcare services for people with various degrees of cognitive and physical disabilities [3]. Not only the elderly and persistently ill but also the families in which both parents have to work will derive advantage from these systems for delivering high-quality care services for their babies and little children. Researchers in computer, networking, biomedical engineering and medical felds are working together in order to make the broad vision of smart healthcare possible. Te importance of integrating large-scale wireless telecommunication technologies such as 3G, Wi-Fi Mesh, and WiMAX, with telemedicine has already been addressed by some researchers. Further improvements will be achieved by the coexistence of small-scale personal area technologies like radio frequency identifcation (RFID), Bluetooth, ZigBee, and wireless sensor networks, together with large scale wireless networks to provide context-aware applications [4]. In addition providing pervasiveness with existing and relatively more mature wireless network technologies, the development of small or wearable sensor devices is a mater of today researches. Tese researches may lead to enabling not only accurate information but also reliable data delivery. Furthermore, the integration of all these technologies is the application, which is the coordinator between the caregivers and the caretakers and between the sensor devices and all of the actors in the overall system cycle. Since the application is the core of the high-quality healthcare service concept, the need for intelligent, context-aware healthcare applications will be increased. Given the importance of the subject, there are already several applications and prototypes on the issue. For example, some of them are devoted to continuous monitoring for cognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or similar cognitive diseases. Some focus on fall detection, posture detection and location tracking and others make use of biological and environmental sensors to identify patients’ health status. Tere is also signifcant research efort in developing tiny wireless sensor devices, preferably integrated into fabric or other substances and be implanted in human body. Some other studies [5-10] have either only smart home perspective or limited information about the design issues and challenges. Te interested reader may fnd a wonderful survey on wireless sensor networks for health care [11]. In our paper we provide discussions not only from a smart home perspective but rather from a more healthcare related perspective. We *Corresponding author: Sabzpoushan SH, Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Iran, Tel: +98-21-73225729, 73225600; E-mail: sabzposh@iust.ac.ir Received October 30, 2014; Accepted December 16, 2014; Published December 18, 2014 Citation: Sabzpoushan SH, Maleki A, Miri F (2015) A Novel Application of Sensor Networks in Biomedical Engineering. Sensor Netw Data Commun 3: 118. doi: 10.4172/2090-4886.1000118 Copyright: © 2015 Sabzpoushan SH, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Abstract Born on other applications, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) grew on the promise of biomedical engineering applications. In this research we suggest system architecture for smart healthcare, based on a novel WSN. Our system particularly targets assisted-living residents and others who may help from continuous remote health monitoring. We present the objectives, advantages, and status of the design. An experimental livelihood space has been constructed at the Department of Biomedical Engineering (DBE) at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) for assessment of our system. A ten days monitoring and experimental results suggest a physically powerful potential for WSNs to open new research area in biomedical engineering, i.e. for low-cost, ad hoc use of multimodal sensors for a better quality of medical care. A Novel Application of Sensor Networks in Biomedical Engineering Sabzpoushan SH 1 *, Maleki A 2 and Miri F 2 1 Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Iran 2 School of Computer Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Iran I n t e r n a ti o n a l J o u r n a l o f S e n s o r N e t w o r k s a n d D a t a C o m m u n i c a ti o n s ISSN: 2090-4886 International Journal of Sensor Networks and Data Communications