Throughput Characterization for Bluetooth Low Energy with Applications in Body Area Networks

A long term healthcare monitoring system requires battery operated devices with low-power technologies. Researchers tried to adapt various short-range technologies for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) in ubiquitous health monitoring. The classical Bluetooth is known for its greedy power consumption, IrDA and NFC require line-of-sight conditions, and ANT has weak coexistence features and interference issues. A typical choice remains ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 based solutions in WBANs because of their low-power consumption. However, the recently proposed Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) announced more compelling features in various aspects. Only few studies have been published supporting these claims on BLE. In this paper, we present a BLE based remote healthcare monitoring platform and we study its compatibility for ECG monitoring. ECG data requires continuous and real-time transmissions, making it particularly challenging for resource constrained devices. In our system, a BLE112 module from Bluegiga and a BLE USB dongle are used for WBAN. The performance of the system is evaluated experimentally and the results showed good potential of this proposed BLE platform in meeting the main QoS requirements of medical applications in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, and packet error rate, while staying energy efficient.

Power efficient ultra-wideband based wireless communication for wireless body area network applications

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a promising wireless network technology, in the context of body area network (BAN) applications, to provide the required quality of service support concerning the communication between sensor nodes placed on a user's body and a personal device, such as a smartphone. Most previous BLE performance studies in the literature have focused primarily in networks with a single slave (point-to-point link) or traffic scenarios with relatively low data rate. However, many BAN sensors generate high data rate traffic, and several sensor nodes (slaves) may be actively sending data in the same BAN. Therefore, this work focuses on the evaluation of the suitability of BLE mainly under these conditions. Results show that, for the same traffic, the BLE protocol presents lower energy consumption and supports more sensor nodes than an alternative IEEE 802.15.4-based protocol. This study also identifies and characterizes some implementation constraints on the tested platforms that impose limits on the achievable performance.

Wireless communications for body area network (BAN) applications require an adaptable, dynamic and flexible medium access control (MAC) to cope with a variety of application requirements. The key requirements in BAN applications are low power consumption, high reliability of intra-BAN communication and low latency. As body posture highly affects the performance of MAC protocols, we evaluate the relaying benefits to reinforce links. However, since radio links are not stationary, the scheduling of the relaying should quickly adapt to BAN changes. We instead propose a BAN Adaptive TDMA MAC (BATMAC) which automatically detects the shadowing effect and adjusts its communication protocols and the parameters of the IEEE 802.15.4 superframe. Finally, we evaluate BATMAC from latency outage and energy consumption points of view depending on the redundancy of the monitoring information.

A non-uniformly spaced digital FIR filter bank has been proposed for QRS detection in wearable biomedical devices in Body Area Network (BAN) applications. The proposed filter bank is constructed based on frequency-response masking technique and employs two half-band filters as prototype filters, which leads to significant savings in terms of arithmetic operations. The introduction of non-uniformly spaced filter bank further enhances the detection accuracy especially in the BAN applications where motion artifacts are a major concern. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm correctly detects the QRS of both resting and exercising ECG, even under the presence of severe motion artifacts, baseline drift and large P/T waves.

In modern vehicles Controller Area Network (CAN) bus has significant importance to transfer data from sensors to Engine Control Unit (ECU) by employing two wire system. CAN bus is very efficient in terms of throughput and reliability but it requires very careful sensor deployment and wiring. In this paper, we propose low cost and energy efficient communication between sensor nodes and ECU using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) within Vehicular Ad Hoc Network by employing Intra Vehicle Wireless Sensor Network. BLE can be readily employed in densely urban environment for inter vehicular (up to 50m range) and intra vehicular (up to 10m range) wireless communication. We have compared BLE and CAN bus for communicating actual engine data between ECUs and sensors, and ECU and Onboard Unit (OBU), in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, latency and coverage area. Proposed BLE based system exhibited very high successful packet delivery ratios for static and driving scenarios with acceptable average RSSI values of at least -10dBm. During extensive tests, BLE CC2540/CC2541 based system also achieved very low current consumption (in microamperes) and longer battery life time (around six months on a standard coin battery).

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the United States. Advances in wireless technology have made possible the remote monitoring of a patient's heart sensors as part of a body area network. Some of these networks use a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) component to transmit the signal between the bio sensors and a smart phone. This study investigates the impact that stray wireless transmissions from residential microwave ovens have on the BLE component of the body area network. The results of this study may lead to improvements and widespread use of body area network medical systems, which may lead to better monitoring, more data, and fewer fatalities due to misdiagnosed heart conditions.

The main bottleneck to achieve energy autonomy in body area networks (BAN) is the design of an ultra low power yet reliable wireless system. In this paper, we first demonstrate the feasibility of an ultra low power receiver by presenting our implemented receiver chip that could operate on a total power of 479.5 uW, which is more than one order of magnitude lower than commercially available low power transceivers working at 2.4 GHz. We then show the reliability of this chip, which can achieve a receiver sensitivity of −72 dBm for a data rate of 1 Mbps. We further demonstrate that this receiver sensitivity is sufficient to guarantee reliability by evaluating this chip in different to-body communication in BAN environments. By using typical BAN channels, simulation results show that our system can provide a reliable link in both the standing and walking situations. With the measured data, we show that a transmit power of −15 dBm is sufficient for our receiver to achieve reliable communication link in different BAN environments. This transmit power requirement is 15 dB lower than the widely known low power Zigbee system. It could thus significantly facilitate the ultra low power transmitter design, and minimize the human exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields. The design and evaluation of our receiver presented in this paper therefore provides a way to move towards the energy autonomy of BAN, and opens access to many new applications in BAN.

Review on miniaturized flexible wearable antenna with SAR measurement for body area network

This work presents the design and implementation of a wireless body area network based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) which enables the integration of multiple sensor nodes into a smartphone-based system in order to monitor the posture of cyclists. The wireless posture monitoring system presented in this chapter obtains the orientation in space of each body segment in which the sensor nodes are placed and calculates the trunk angle, the knee angle and the angle of inclination of the road. This system collects raw sensor data from accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes and sends the data via BLE to an Android smartphone, which plays the role of central station and performs the data processing concerning the posture calculation. This chapter describes the development of the hardware and software of the sensor nodes, which are based on the CC2540 BLE system-on-chip, as well as the development of the Android application. Experimental results concerning the measurement of the posture of a cyclist are provided in order to validate the implementation.

This paper describes a low complexity, low data rate ultra-wideband system suited for use in body area network (BAN) applications. The described system has lower complexity and power consumption compared to similar systems for BAN applications. System architecture is defined and expected results in BAN communication channel are presented. Main building blocks like analog RF front-end IC and small size antennas suitable for applications on the human body have been developed and produced. Some measurement results of the implementation are presented.

This paper addresses the problem of battery life in ambulatory systems for monitoring biomedical signals in the mobile healthcare environment. Specifically, the paper examines the potential power savings that may be obtained using the recently-introduced Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) specification, where wireless signal transmission is used between a wearable sensor, and a Body Area Network (BAN) hub e.g. a mobile phone. To demonstrate the potential savings, ambulatory monitoring of ECG for heart rate variability analysis is used as an example application, where the ECG signal is transmitted from the wearable sensor to the BAN hub. Furthermore, the paper also examines the additional savings that may be obtained using compression of the ECG signal prior to transmission. The analysis shows that using both compression and BLE has the potential to extend battery life by a factor of 8 compared to the current Bluetooth 3.0 standard.

It is worth mentioning that the growing use of wireless sensor networks, evolution in Nano biosensors and micro medical equipment, remote health monitoring has affected treatment. Since people have tended to ubiquitous health monitoring, real time medical health care systems will have great significance. It is crystal clear that offering a new design of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) in real time healthcare's system is very important. To pave the way for the discussion, we would like to pay your attention to the previous studies in which we have improved energy efficiency and security in WBAN. To pave the way for further discussion now, we would like to review the third aspect of WBAN challenge in maximum efficiency and performance, with the approaching security and optimal energy in the real time health care system applications. In a word, in this paper urgency of using WBAN for real time telemedicine is to be discussed.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are becoming inevitable in this world of high technology as it provides low cost access to broadband services. Moreover, the technologists are doing research to make WMN more reliable and secure. Subsequently, among wireless ad-hoc networking technologies, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is gaining high degree of importance among researchers due to its easy availability in the gadgets and low power consumption. BLE started its journey from version 4.0 and announced the latest version 5 with mesh support capability. BLE being a low power and mesh supported technology is nowadays among the hot research topics for the researchers. Many of the researchers are working on BLE mesh technology to make it more efficient and smart. Apart from other variables of efficiency, like all communication networks, mesh network security is also of a great concern. In view of the aforesaid, this paper provides a comprehensive review on several works associated to the security in WMN and BLE mesh networks and the research related to the BLE security protocols. Moreover, after the detailed research on related works, this paper has discussed the pros and cons of the present developed mesh security mechanisms. Also, at the end after extracting the curx from the present research on WMN and BLE mesh security, this research study has devised some solutions as how to mitigate the BLE mesh network security lapses.

Due to the rise in the elderly population and the prevalence of chronic diseases, healthcare organizations around the world are faced with an economic burden which will continue to grow. For this reason there is an urgent demand to reduce the intake of elders in hospitals and nursing homes by allowing them to live independently for greater lengths of time. In response to this demand, researchers are strongly focusing on 'telemonitoring', which is the use of information technology (IT) to monitor the health status of an individual from a remote location (e.g. their home). The first aim of this thesis was to investigate how telemonitoring technologies can detect elderly activities for health assessment purposes. To assess a patient's health status holistically, a wide variety of factors needed be considered by practitioners. Currently many telemonitoring technologies in research have addressed these factors/assessments by monitoring elderly activities. However based on the literature reviews, researchers have not been able to develop a comprehensive understanding of how these technologies support each assessment. Therefore the first contribution in chapter 3 of this thesis addresses this gap. A literature review was conducted where 215 telemonitoring technologies were identified from 82 papers, published between 2000 and 2016. Six assessments which involve monitoring of activities were identified as (1) mobility, (2) nutrition, (3) safety, (4) cognitive, (5) social, and (6) routine. All included technologies were categorized into six tables according to the assessment that they supported. From assessing the contents of these tables, it was found that a significant portion of ITs relate to mobility, nutritional, safety and routine assessments. Many of the studies were found to assess technologies inside of laboratory setting and still require improvement before they are suited for real world application. It also found that many of the technologies were not equipped with wireless communication. In recent years recently have been focusing been integrating wireless sensing technology into telemonitoring applications. Many of these wireless technologies are small, unobtrusive, and usually need to be powered by small batteries (e.g. coin cell) which have limited capacity. For this reason, researchers have had difficulties prolonging battery life to a duration that is practical. However the recent release of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has the potential of resolving this issue due to its power saving qualities. The 2nd aim of this thesis is to assess the performance of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in telemonitoring frameworks using advertising mode. Advertising mode is often used for device discovery purposes, however it can also be used to send context data without the need for device connection establishment. This method has received little investigation from researchers and yet it has the potential of offering advantages such as reduction in power consumption and manufacturing costs. Therefore in this thesis, the performance of BLE advertising mode was used within two telemonitoring applications. Firstly, a new device called 'BLUESOUND' is proposed. The device uses ultrasound sensing technology which can efficiently differentiate multiple residents in a home environment based on their height. The device consists of three sensing/communication modules: A Passive Infrared (PIR) occupancy module, an ultrasound array module and a BLE communication module. The PIR occupancy module is used to detect walking direction, while the ultrasound array measures the resident's height. The combination of these two technologies can also be used to detect a resident's velocity. BLE advertising mode is used to communicate acquired data to a smart phone gateway/database. A new embedded algorithm was able to increase the energy efficiency of the identification technology. Comprehensive modelling and experimentation was undertaken to assess the performance the BLUESOUND device. The BLUESOUND device was able to distinguish between multiple resident identities by measuring height accurately. Currently researchers have developed various wearable ECG monitors as there is a demand to detect the onset of cardiac disease earlier in the elderly population. However most of these devices have only lasted a couple of days on a coin cell battery which is not practical. Therefore the performance of BLE advertising mode was explored using a virtual BLE based ECG model in MATLAB. To further minimize power consumption, an ECG extraction technique (based on the 'So and Chan' algorithm [1]) was used in the model to extract some of the most significant points on the signal. Based on three simulation trails, ECG data was transferred to a scanning device with high accuracy (average of 99.62%). It was estimated that the virtual system is approximately 13 times more energy efficient compared to sending ECG stream data continuously when a connection is established.