People worldwide are getting older and this fact has pushed the need for designing new, more pervasive, and possibly cost effective healthcare systems. In this field, distributed and networked embedded systems, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs), are the most appealing technology to achieve continuous monitoring of aged people for their own safety, without affecting their daily activities. This paper proposes recent advancements in this field by introducing WSN4QoL, a Marie Curie project which involves academic and industrial partners from three EU countries. The project aims to propose new WSN-based technologies to meet the specific requirements of pervasive healthcare applications. In particular, in this paper, the system architecture is presented to cope with the challenges imposed by the specific application scenario. This includes a network coding (NC) mechanism and a distributed localization solution that have been implemented on WSN testbeds to achieve efficiency in the communications and to enable indoor people tracking. Preliminary results in a real environment show good system performance that meet our expectations.

Peer Reviewed