On the design of distributed autonomous embedded systems for biomedical applications

Jose Germano, Rui Ramalho, Leonel Sousa
2009 Proceedings of the 3d International ICST Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare  
Embedded systems assume an increasing importance in several biomedical applications. These applications present dissimilar requirements and characteristics, posing problems at the computing and communication levels. This paper proposes a general network based platform that follows a distributed approach based on a client/server architecture, in order to integrate embedded systems for biomedical applications. This platform makes use of autonomous communication modules, and relies on personal
more » ... tal assistants to act as Masters, and to interconnect the embedded systems to computer networks. Information is sent to a main server that maintains and provides access to a database. Data security is assured in all systems by using cryptographic algorithms and protocols. Two embedded systems have been developed based on this platform, a simple system for movement monitoring, and another for biomolecular recognition detection. Furthermore, we show that the optimization of the communication module lead to an increase of 70% of the platform's autonomy for the movement monitoring system. I. INTRODUCTION In the last few years there has been a growing interest on embedded systems for biomedical applications, increasing the demand on computing and communication, but, at the same time, reinforcing the necessity to keep them portable and autonomous. Applications such as biochemical operations for clinical analysis (e.g, glucosellactate analysis), DNA analysis and proteomics analysis for clinical diagnostics [1] , and real-time pervasive patient monitoring and biomedical digital assistants [2]-[4] are typical examples where portability and computing power are important requirements. However, namely in the latter case, computing and communication requirements lead to the integration of wireless devices on the embedded systems in order to communicate with general purpose computing systems. Therefore, the actual embedded systems for biomedical applications have to be designed with low power communication sub-systems and, on the other hand, have to be easily integrated with more general distributed computing platforms. Reliability and security issues have to be considered on those platforms, both at computation and communication levels [5] . Distributed embedded systems for biological and biomedical applications is one of the most multidisciplinary research areas, which covers fields from micromechanics and microsystems [6], signal acquisition and digital signal processing [7], embedded systems, computer networks, and information systems and databases [5] . The enormous diversity of sensors and medical apparatus demands the development of general
doi:10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth2009.5966 dblp:conf/ph/GermanoRS09 fatcat:7wrx5io2pravlhbao7jig4bfrq