Towards Wearable Sensing Enabled Healthcare Framework for Elderly Patients

The pervasive and smart healthcare is important for elderly patients which has revolutionized the medical world and caught the attention from industry and academia with the help of portable sensor-enabled devices. Tiny size and resource-constrained nature restricts them to perform several tasks at a time. Thus, energy drain, limited battery lifetime, and high packet loss ratio (PLR) are the key challenges to be tackled carefully for ubiquitous healthcare. Energy efficiency, reliability and longer battery cycle are the vital ingredients for wearable devices to empower cost-effective and pervasive medical environment. Thus, this research work has three key contributions. First, a novel transmission power control driven energy efficient algorithm (EEA) is proposed to enhance energy, battery lifetime and reliability while monitoring the health status of elderly patients. Proposed EEA and conventional constant transmission power control (TPC) are evaluated by adopting real-time datasets of static (i.e., wheelchair sitting) and dynamic (i.e., wheelchair moving) body postures of elderly patients. Second, smart healthcare framework is proposed. Third, performance metrics such as, energy drain, battery lifetime and reliability are introduced and calculated by considering average and threshold RSSI and TPC values. Finally, it is observed through experimental analysis that the proposed EEA enhances energy efficiency with acceptable PLR than the constant TPC during data transmission.