NFC in Medical Applications with Wireless Sensors

Huijuan Zhang
School of Software Engineering Tongji University Shanghai, China mszhj@tongji.edu.cn
AbstractWireless sensors have the potential to greatly affect the health monitoring systems in health care. By outfitting patients with wireless, wearable sensors, monitoring the health condition of patients is distinctly simplified. Considering the current methods of health monitoring, medical assistants or caregivers just use some instruments such as Sphygmomanometer and Electrocardiograph to record the health status of patients on daily or some hourly basis, which is definitely time-consuming. In this paper we provide a solution to this tedious and time consuming task by using Near Field communication (NFC), an upcoming technology along with wireless sensors and android applications. By implementing the architecture described in the paper, medical assistants would simply use NFC enabled devices to collect the data from patients only touching or getting it closer to patient's NFC enabled device. Data collected from wireless sensors is stored in patient's devices first, and then it is transferred to the hospital database under patients medical record via tapping two devices directly. Thus it provides an easy way to collect the medical data and save time. Keywords- Near Field communication (NFC); Wireless Sensors; Communication; NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF)

Junlin Li
School of Software Engineering Tongji University Shanghai, China leejunlin.orange@gmail.com providing the platform for NFC communication. The main goal of this concept is to get the vital information of patients through wireless sensors, via NFC and storing it in hospital database under the patients records using Android mobile applications. Such kind of records maintenance is very important in deep analysis and continuous monitoring of patients. This paper is divided into four sections where section 2 describes about the architecture of the system; section 3 speaks about the working process and section 4 for conclusion and the future work. A. Wireless medical sensor Nowadays, more and more wireless sensors have been used for medical purpose, such as Pulse oximeter and electrocardiograph (ECG) to measure the pulse rate and electrical activity of the heart. The detail descriptions of these two devices are presented below. 1) Pulse oximeter Pulse oximeter has been in use as a medical diagnostic technique since its invention in the early 1970s [1]. This noninvasive technology is used to reliably assess two key patient health metrics, heart rate (HR) and blood oxygen saturation. These parameters indicate a lot of critical information, particularly in emergencies when a sudden change in the heart rate or reduction in blood oxygenation [1]. Pulse oximeter involves the projection of infrared and near infrared light through blood vessels near the skin. By detecting the amount of light absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood at two different wavelengths, the level of oxygen saturation can be measured. In addition, heart rate can be determined from the pattern of light absorption over time, since blood vessels contract and expand with the patients pulse [2]. In order to use it in wireless sensor network, it should be in the form of mote, is a wireless node which can transmit and receive the data on its own. 2) Electrocardiograph (EKG) Two different types of electrocardiograph (EKG or ECG) are commonly used in clinical and trauma care to measure the electrical activity of the heart. The device records a short sampling of the hearts electrical activity between different pairs of electrodes. Each pair of leads provides a unique and detailed picture of the cardiac rhythm, an individual echo of the hearts electrical impulses [1].

I.

INTRODUCTION

During the last half decade, sensor networking technologies have been widely deployed and implemented for a range of scientific, health care industry, and military applications. Among that health care is one of the significant applications of wireless sensors due to its ability to fetch the real time data, compactness, power consumption, wearable feature and its effectiveness to interact with the wireless network. Thus emerging application for wireless sensor networks involves their use in medical care. In a hospital or clinic, outfitting every patient with tiny, wearable wireless vital sign sensors would allow doctors, nurses or other caregivers to continuously monitor the status of their patients. In an emergency or disaster scenario, the same technology would enable medics to carry more effective care for large numbers of casualties. Wireless sensors could augment or replace existing wired telemetry systems for many specific clinical applications, such as physical rehabilitation or long-term ambulatory monitoring. In this paper wireless sensor network is accomplished by using NFC which aims to bridge the data between patients and caregivers. Our architecture consists of four key components: Wireless medical sensors for reading the parameters of health status, tinyOS and nesC for programming the sensor node, NFC for communication and Android mobile applications for

978-1-4244-8165-1/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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The mote based EKG is developed on sensor boards for both the Mica2/MicaZ and Telos mote platforms which provide continuous EKG monitoring by measuring the differential across a single pair of electrodes. The circuit design incorporates the Texas Instruments INA321 CMOS instrumentation amplifier, an earlier version of the schematic is shown in [3]. B. TinyOS and nesC TinyOS is an operating system specifically designed for network embedded systems. TinyOS has a programming model tailored for event-driven applications as well as a very small footprint (the core OS requires 400 bytes of code and data memory, combined). TinyOS has several important features that influenced nesCs design as below: 1) Component-based architecture: TinyOS provides a set of reusable system components. An application connects components using a wiring specification that is independent of component implementations. Although most OS components are software modules, some are thin wrappers around hardware. The distinction is invisible to the developer [4]. 2) Tasks and event-based concurrency: There are two sources of concurrency in TinyOS: tasks and events. Tasks are deferred computation mechanisms which do not preempt each other. Components can post tasks and use them when timing requirements are not strict. The lifetime requirements of sensor networks prohibit heavy computation, keeping the system reactive. TinyOS execution is ultimately driven by events representing hardware interrupts [4, 5]. 3) Split-phase operations: Because tasks execute non-preemptively, TinyOS has no blocking operations. All long-latency operations are split-phase operation request and completions are separate functions. Commands are typically requests to execute an operation. 4) nesC NesC applications are built out of components with welldefined, bidirectional interfaces. It defines a concurrency model, based on tasks and events, and detects data races at compile time. NesC is an extension of c language which provides efficient code for all the target microcontrollers. NesC owns all the low-level features necessary for accessing hardware and interaction with existing C code. C. Near Field Communication Near Field Communication (NFC) is a contactless communication technology. It is an advancement of inductively coupled proximity Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. Therefore, NFC supports contactless smartcard systems based on the standards ISO/IEC 14443. NFC has three operating modes: peer-to-peer mode, card emulation mode and reader/writer mode. The peer-to-peer mode allows two NFC devices to communicate directly with each other. In card emulation mode, an NFC device emulates a contactless smartcard and, is able to communicate with existing RFID readers. In reader/writer mode, NFC devices can access

contactless smartcards, RFID transponders and NFC tags. NFC tags are basic data containers that offer read and write functions to store and retrieve data. These tags are usually used to store content like Internet addresses (URLs), telephone numbers and text messages or electronic business cards. By simply touching a tag with an NFC device the information is transferred. The content is structured according to the NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF, [6]), which is a standardized format for storing formatted data on NFC tags and for transporting data across a peer-to-peer NFC link [6]. NFC allows communication to take place through short range wireless technology between two devices which are nearer or touched to each other momentarily. NFC is a standard based technology that enables simple and intuitive two way interaction between electronic devices. It simplifies setup of some longer-range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The technology works via magnetic field induction. Tags are embedded within devices. The devices can be any mobile devices such as mobile phones or PDAs, or NFC stations such as ticket barriers or cash registers. There are usually two common uses of NFC in peoples daily life. 1) Ticketing and Payment Contactless payment is used in transportation systems everywhere. Compared to RFID, by introducing NFC to the current ticketing systems, users can get all of the service provided in smart card, with the added functionality of a user interface. Its also possible to add multiple separate credits or debit cards to an NFC mobile device, thus mobile becomes virtual wallet [7]. 2) Touch to pair/ Touch to share Another important application is data sharing through simple and seamless transfer from one device to another by simply touching them together. In a similar case, users of NFC could touch to access a wireless LAN hotspot. Instead of the lengthy process of searching for a hotspot, accessing it and paying for use, a user could simply touch an NFC compatible wireless LAN point and the whole process could be automated, including the payment of any cost from the virtual wallet on the device [7]. II.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE SYSTEM

Our system mainly consists of two parts as show below: A. Wireless sensors and base station: In our system we use two medical wireless sensors, pulse oximeter and ECG to measure the pulse and record the activity of heart. These reading will be sent to a base station. Base station can be Zolertia Z1 node. Z1 is equipped with a second generation MSP430F2617 low power microcontroller, which features a powerful 16-bit RISC CPU @16MHz clock speed, built-in clock factory calibration, 8KB RAM and a 92KB Flash memory. The hardware selection of Z1 guarantees the maximum efficiency and robustness with low energy cost [8].

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B. NFC enabled Android phones: Any smart phone with GPRS or Wi-Fi function which runs on Android version greater or equal to 2.3 (Gingerbread), can greatly support NFC. Android 2.3 includes an NFC stack and framework API that lets developers read NDEF tags that are discovered as a user touches an NFC-enabled device to tag elements embedded in stickers, smart posters, and even other devices [9]. USB connection is used to connect the base station, through which data can be received from base station.

MAC encryption key (km) is fed through variables a, b, c, d and then this key is XORing with 32-bit Ct with 32-bit of a, and 32-bit MAC can be obtained by XORing of all (a, b, e, d) outputs. This encrypted message can be then placed in the radio stack of the medical wireless sensors for the transmission [10]. During the reception of the message at the base station, decryption task must be performed to get the right form of message. Prior to this, receiver should know about encryption key and MAC encryption, so that decryption is possible to get the raw data. Authentication is possible to achieve to have some key included at the beginning of the data. Sender and receiver should have the common key if they are paired in transmission. So if the key received is what is expected then the message can be taken for further processing else it can be discarded. These techniques avoid the reception of message from other senders. From base station, data can be taken to the phone through serial port or USB port via USB cable. The android application will receive the data through serial port and keep it in the internal buffer. Now the data needs to be transferred from this internal buffer to NFC tag for communication. The below protocol and message format defines how this process can be done. B. Communication over NFC The NFC Data Exchange Format (NDEF) is a standardized format for storing formatted data on NFC tags and for transporting data across a peer-to-peer NFC link. The data from the buffer can be incorporated into a NDEF format and can be written to NFC tags. An NDEF record consists of multiple header fields and a payload field. The header contains five flags Message Begin (MB), Message End (ME), Chunk Flag (CF), Short Record (SR) and ID Length Present (IL), as well as a type classification (Type Name Format, TNF), and length information for fields of variable length, a type identification (Type) and an optional record identifier (ID). MB and ME mark the first and the last record of an NDEF message respectively. The flag CF, if set to 1, specifies that the payload of this record is continued in the next record. SR defines the size of the Payload Length field: When SR is 0 the payload length is a 4-byte unsigned integer, otherwise it is a 1-byte unsigned integer. This flag is useful to reduce the memory consumption of short records. If the flag IL is set to 1, then the optional ID field and its corresponding length field are present [6].The value of the TNF field determines the format of the type information. The ID field may be used to specify a unique identifier (in the form of a URI) for each record. The Payload field carries the actual data. The data is formatted according to the type information in the Type field. A data packet can be divided into multiple record chunks. In this case the first record contains the type information and the optional record identifier. The remaining chunks do not carry this information, but instead have their TNF field set to unchanged [6]. C. Authentication of NFC receiver devices

Figure 1. Overview of the system structure

III.

WORKING PROCESS OF THE SYSTEM

The main goal of the system is to transfer the data automatically from wireless sensors to the hospital database which keeps all the records of patients. The data flow can be divided into 3 main parts: A. Data flow from wireless sensors to NFC enabled devices. Data from the sensor nodes can be transmitted to the base station node through piece of coding in nesC writing on tinyOS. Through the initialization of the sensor component and using the statement for a certain number of fixed time period data can be sent to the base station frequently. Since sensor nodes broadcast the data, we need to have certain validation to make sure that data received is from the right sensor node. For this reason we use a message authentication code (MAC) scheme proposed to achieve authenticity and encryption. Definition of MAC: Let Pt be raw data from sensors Let Ct as ciphertext Let ke as encryption key Let km as MAC encryption key Let ct[i] be denoted i-th 32 bit word of cipher text 1) Ct= Eke(Pt). 2) {a,b,c,d}=km(128-bit). 3) {a,b,c,d}=Ct[i] a,b,c,d. 4) MAC=a b c d. The encrypted ciphertext (Ct) is splitting into 32-bit blocks, and then padding the last word with zeroes. Meanwhile, the

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1. At first the receiver will send a data transfer request along with its International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) and public key. 2. The sender then authenticates the receiver with the received ID which should be stored prior to start of data transmission. 3. If the receiver ID is stored in sender mobile then the data communication will begin which provides security and authentication of receiver. IV.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

transmission occurs within a certain range of meter, much further than the maximum distance of NFC. So by using RFID, data can be easily confused from different patients. Drawbacks of our system: Limited use of NFC enabled devices. Not too many phones available in market support NFC. Need to install an application in patients phone that collects the data from base station taken through the serial port. Not able to identify the patient location and cannot get the data from remote location. If the caregivers device is lost or changed, then new IMEI must be updated in all patients devices.

The system is aimed to collect the medical data of patients automatically, from the wireless sensors to base station, then to the center database. We evaluate the effectiveness of the technologies used in this system by comparing them to other methods. A. Challenges existing in wireless sensor network (WSN) comparing to above system 1. Multiple receivers: We expect that the data from a given patient will typically be received by multiple doctors or nurses caring for the patient. This suggests that the network layer should support multicast semantics. 2. Device mobility: Both patients and caregivers are mobile (not at fixed place), which requires that the communication layer adapt rapidly to changes in link quality. For example, if a multihop routing protocol is in use, it should quickly find new routes when a doctor moves from one room to another room during rounds. 3. Geographic Routing in Sensor Networks: Routing in sensor networks differs from routing in both ad-hoc wireless networks and the Internet. It is attribute-based and often includes geographical location. Routing schemes that operate primarily on local information are more appropriate, since these can be reactive to local changes, 4. Security: Lots of security measures are implemented in the WSN like public and private key cryptography which are complex and expensive to use. In this system one needs to enter the pin or authentication code after touching the mobile to get the data. B. Comparison between Bluetooth and NFC Disadvantages of using Bluetooth are Explicit connection setup needs to be done during starting of transmission each time. Need to select the file and send to required device manually.

In future NFC devices can be made independent of any other equipment, like mobile phone in our case. It can be in the form of a small chip consists of passive NFC tags attached to patient body and there can be active NFC receiver attached in the patients environment so that distance can be less than 10cm. This active NFC receiver can also be placed in several places in hospital. In this way, it is also possible to find the patient location. REFERENCES
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C. Comparison between RFID and NFC NFC offers two way communications, while RFID has only one direction communication, which makes the authentication process impossible. Before the data transmission, security key needs to be entered from receiver device, which is verified by sender device and then communication starts. RFID

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