Sensor Medium Access Control Protocol-Based Epilepsy Patients Monitoring System

Abstract

This thesis focuses on using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for monitoring applications on epilepsy patients (EPs). With the increase of these types of patients and the necessity of continuous daily monitoring and the need for an immediate response to their seizures, the main objective of this thesis is to decrease the response time in order to save them from severe consequences, as well as to make them comfortable with the monitoring procedure. Our proposed Epilepsy Patients Monitoring System (EPMS) consists of five ordinary nodes distributed over the patient’s body, as well as a coordinator node and a receive node. These nodes detect the seizures and forward the data to the coordinator, which, in turn, collects the data and transmits it to the receiver, triggering an alarm concerning the seizure occurrence. We focus on the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, using the Sensor Medium Access Control (SMAC) protocol to decrease the generated delay, and the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/ Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme to prevent collisions that can prolong the response time.