Cardiac Monitoring of Marathon Runners using DisruptionTolerant Wireless Sensors

Abstract. In most current biomedical monitoring applications, data ac-quired by sensors attached to a patient are either transmitted directly to a monitoring console for real-time processing, or they are simply recorded on the sensor unit for deferred analysis. In contrast collecting and trans-mitting biomedical data continuously over long distances in outdoor con-ditions is still a challenge. In this paper we investigate the possibility of using disruption-tolerant wireless sensors to monitor the cardiac activity of runners during a marathon race, using off-the-shelf sensing devices and a limited number of base stations deployed along the marathon route. Preliminary experiments conducted with a few volunteers run-ning around a university campus confirm that this approach is viable, and suggest that it should scale up to a real marathon.