Real-time sink node architecture for a service robot based on active healthcare/living-support USN

This paper proposes a system architecture for USN with a service robot to provide more active assisted living services for elderly persons by monitoring their mental and physical well-being with USN environments at home, hospital, or silver town. Sensors embedded in USN are used to detect preventive measures for chronic disease. Logged data are transferred to main controller of a service robot via wireless channel in which the analysis of data is performed. For the purpose of handling emergency situations, it needs real-time processing on gathering variety sensor data, routing algorithms for sensor nodes to a moving sink node and processing of logged data. This paper realized multi-hop sensor network to detect user movements with biometric data transmission and performed algorithms on Xenomai, a real-time embedded Linux. To leverage active sensing, a mobile robot is used of which task was implemented with a priority to process urgent data came from the sink-node. This software architecture is anticipated to integrate sensing, communication and computing with real-time manner. In order to verify the usefulness of a proposed system, the performance of data transferring and processing on a real-time OS with non real-time OS is also evaluated.