RFID and Sensor Networks: Architectures, Protocols, Security

Integrated RFID and Sensor Networks for Health Care � 567
medication monitoring to a broader elder home-care system, from one room to an entire
house, featuring more sensors and RFID components distributed at various strategic
places and on various household items. Another extension would be adding the capability
of notifying family members via email, and networking with an external health-care
center monitor system for any assistance via the Internet.
20.4 A Development Platform for Sensor Networks
and RFID for Health Care
In this section, a new application development platform for the integration of RFID and
sensor networks targeting at health-care applications is described. A preliminary version
of the work has been reported in Ref. [17]. After the introduction in Section 20.4.1,
a brief overview on programming abstractions and related middleware projects will be
presented in Section 20.4.2. The core components of the development platform will
be described in Section 20.4.3, followed by protocol implementation illustration in
Section 20.4.4, and a summary will be drawn in Section 20.4.5.
20.4.1 Introduction
Currently, most RFID and sensor network applications, including those presented above,
are implemented as complex, low-level programs that specify the behavior of individual
sensor nodes [12]. In order for RFID and sensor networks (RSN) to realize their full
potential and to succeed commercially, however, it is necessary to enable users of RSN
to develop their own applications that tailor to their specific needs. For example, in the
case of a room designed to care for patients and elders [5], it is desirable that health-care
experts can configure and control these RFID and sensors as to what and how often to
sense, what event to log, and when to signal an alarm or take an action. Similarly, in the
case of tracking hospital personnel or blood bags [7], hospital management may develop
an application suitable for their specific purposes. In addition, it is necessary that they
may change these configurations and control parameters as they need.
These users of RSN, such as health-care experts and hospital management mentioned
above, are what we would call “domain specialists.” They are not scientists who design
RFID, sensors, or sensor networks, nor are they software engineers who can develop
complex programs acting on these sensors. It will be beneficial that they are able to develop
tailored applications without sophisticated scientific or programming background.
Toward this goal, this section attempts to propose an application development platform
for RSN. The platform is to be used by domain specialists to develop applications
for configuring and controlling RFID and sensors for their specific targets. It is highly
desirable that the platform is simple to use, yet robust enough to support a good variety of
complex applications. A preliminary version of this work has been presented in Ref. [17].
Six approaches taken in the design of middleware for wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) have been identified in Ref. [9] (more discussions on WSN middleware are
given in Section 20.4.2). Among them, the event-based approach is chosen for this
work. It provides fast responses and offers less communication overhead. These features
are advantageous to the RSN applying to health care.