Detecting mobility for monitoring patients with Parkinson's disease at home using RSSI in a Wireless Sensor Network

e-Healthcare is a popular healthcare application of Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN). Today home monitoring of patients with movement disorders, monitoring of elderly for early fall detection are very popular applications. Our research focuses on one such important application of continuous, non-invasive, and wireless monitoring of the patients with Parkinson's disease, for preventing potential falls and injuries and recording the number of occurrences of Freezing of Gait (FoG) over single or multiple days. We propose a home based monitoring system which involves embedding of wireless sensors in the patient's vicinity, such as in his room. Analyzing the values of RSSI which is the measure of received signal strength, from these sensor nodes we implement a robust patient's activity monitoring system for early fall determination. Multiple occurrences of FoG can also be monitored with our system, which is not possible to record at the doctor's clinic due to its relation with the degree of consciousness when a person is at the hospital. We also plan to derive different mobility patterns for a person during his/her day's activity and train the system accordingly. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.