Wireless sensor network (WSN) has become a significant
technology and Wireless (body) sensors can be deployed
on patients to continually monitor their physiological
health conditions. The wireless body sensors can then be
configured to convey the patient's status directly to the
assigned doctor/nurse through the personal smart phone,
PDA or Palm device. In this situation, Wireless Mesh
Networks (WMN) can be used to transmit vital information
arising form the wireless Body sensor Network (WBSN) to
the backbone network. It may be mentioned that WMN
which is an extension of LAN, has far better range
involving very little wiring. The integration of WBSN and
WMN technologies, results in Wireless Sensor Mesh
Network (WSMN) and this technique has already been
proposed by one of the authors of this paper, for usage in
the medical field. In this paper we present the results on
the performance of such a WSMN used for patient health
monitoring application, in terms of parameters like delay,
MAC delay and throughput under varying number of
patients and varying number of doctors in wards and also
the failure performance when the mesh nodes fail based on
simulation study carried out with Opnet modeller 15.0.