The rapid advancement of wireless communication technology over the past decade has greatly improved the quality of life. Such trend has an inevitable impact on the design of modern wearable healthcare devices that allow patients to perform routine tasks with few restrictions of their daily activities but under the close monitoring of their vital physiological signs. With the help of ubiquitous wireless communication networks, wearable devices can be easily integrated into the cloud medical services and enhance the healthcare quality. While the wearable devices provide real time surveillance, cloud medical service can perform background analysis on the patient data and alert physicians and caregivers of the potential health risks of the patient. Preventive measures can be implemented to mitigate the risk and avoid the consequent huge medical cost.
Our lab specializes in both hardware design and software development of wearable devices. We have established a wearable device platform that utilizes microcontrollers driven by the real time operating system as the embedded processing unit. It has the flexibility to select one of the most popular wireless technologies, i.e, WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, for the data communication. It allows multitask processing and significantly increases the onboard processing capability. The platform isolates the device application code from the underlying hardware infrastructure and ensures the porting of the code to a different hardware structure with less effort.