Description
Increase in number of people requiring medical care is caused by large number of baby boomers reaching retirement and passing of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). It is a well-known fact that large number of baby boomers is reaching retirement in the near future. Many people will be entering nursing homes, retirement homes or prefer to stay home. This along with Affordable Care Act places a huge demand for efficient and timely health care for this population. There are not enough medical professionals to meet this demand. This demand will be exasperated in the future as more and more people are shying away to go to medical school because of large costs involved. Also some of the medical professionals are choosing to reduce the number of hours of practice for various reasons. Smart intelligent remote monitoring system using wireless networks, smart sensors, and fuzzy logic have been discussed in the past. These methods mapped the sensor data into risk levels. The response time of the medical professional depends on the delays in receiving this information and the delay involved in processing the data before communicating to the right professional. This thesis addresses the advantages of an intelligent processing of sensor data at the patient level using fuzzy logic. The impact of communication technologies ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.6 on End to End (Patient to medical facility) delay, energy consumption along with the reduction of response times after the data is received at the medical facility are investigated. In order to evaluate the performance of such a system, a simulation environment is implemented using OPNET.
