Sensor fault and patient anomaly detection and classification in medical wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are vulnerable to a plethora of different fault types and external attacks after their deployment. We focus on sensor networks used in healthcare applications for vital sign collection from remotely monitored patients. These types of personal area networks must be robust and resilient to sensor failures as their capabilities encompass highly critical systems. Our objective is to propose an anomaly detection algorithm for medical wireless sensor networks. Our proposed approach firstly classifies instances of sensed patient attributes as normal and abnormal. Once we detect an abnormal instance, we use regression prediction to discern between a faulty sensor reading and a patient entering into a critical state. Our experimental results on real patient datasets show that our proposed approach is able to quickly detect patient anomalies and sensor faults with high detection accuracy while maintaining a low false alarm ratio.