Design and Application of ZigBee Locating and Transparent Transmission Serial Port Module for Tele-health Monitoring

Traditional patient monitoring equipment has the capability of real-time monitoring, but now the tele-health equipment in the aged community service needs not only real-time monitoring but person locating in the communities for mobile applications. The paper presents a new WSN solution for tele-health equipment that can transmit the real-time monitoring and locating data by improving ZigBee module. The method does not change the transition of traditional signal detection module, let the detection module transmit the real-time data by UART to ZigBee router, and the ZigBee locating router module gets the data and packs the data and locating information together, and transmit the whole package by ZigBee stack's wireless protocol to ZigBee coordinator, and the coordinator convert the application level protocol data to RS-232 port for web-based tele-health management platform. The method makes the ZigBee locating module not only a main controller but a locating node by the modified ZigBee application level protocol, which avoids using a new controller for getting the locating data and real-time detection data by two separate UART. This approach decreases the equipment components to two core modules, not three modules. And the cost and power consumption is to be reduced.