No, you can use what ever logarithmic base. For natural information you could use unit "nat" with base e and for binary information unit "bit" with base 2.
Maybe this would help you?
http://paos.colorado.edu/research/wavelets/bams_79_01_0061.pdf
And yes, you can use cofficients or sums of cofficients as a input data. You could use also a wavelet network where neurons activation functions are wavelet functions. See...
You can also use R-language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_%28programming_language%29
with Wavelet packet
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/wavelets/index.html
Good starter book about wavelets with R language...