Wireless sensor networks for pervasive health applications

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

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) deal with variety of healthcare services with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, QoS handling is a challenging problem in such networks. In general, QoS related problems can be addressed from different layers in the networking protocol suite. Design of an efficient QoS aware Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol can address this problem in MAC layer. This paper analyzes the QoS requirements of WBAN, identifies the requisites of QoS handling system, and outlines the trends that are being followed for its advancement with focus on QoS issues at MAC layer. We review some prior works, compare them, and analyze the current research concerned with problem of providing QoS in WBAN. We also explore some open issues and discuss them.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is an emerging field of research which has been progressing rapidly in recent years. WBAN is a network utilized for continuous monitoring of physiological state of the subject, where the patient can perform his regular activities while his body parameters get measured continuously and are accessed by the physician remotely. This chapter provides a thorough survey of current WBAN technologies in the healthcare sector. Besides the recording of physiological parameters, discussions have been provided on remote data transmission to a server called Virtual Doctor Server (VDS). During this transmission, WBAN network uses various technologies namely Ultra Wide Band WBAN, Technology Enabled Medical Precision Observation 3.1 (TEMPO 3.1), J2ME and Bluetooth. Details of several existing WBAN related projects have been discussed along with their applications. The next section of the chapter deals with the use and design of medical sensors in WBAN. Performance comparison between WBAN and WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) has also been provided.

Nowadays, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are used in many fields. WBANs are described as small sensor nodes that communicate wirelessly and provide services to the personal area. Quality of Service (QoS) is an essential issue for WBANs due to the importance of human life. QoS problems can only be solved with a robust Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in WBANs. To find a solution to this problem, developers performed many MAC protocols for WBANs. ISO/IEEE 11073 health informatics defines the standard of personal health information and purposes to provide interoperability between medical technologies. This paper presents a MAC protocol that provides ISO/IEEE 11073 communication standards with QoS support, bases on cross-layer architecture. We designed a slot assignment scheme, prioritization mechanism, admission control mechanism to provide QoS. The performance evaluation of the proposed MAC protocol is compared with IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 protocols by considering end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and throughput parameters, and it has achieved out performance. It is observed that the proposed protocol doesn't exceed 45 ms delay, reached 81% traffic load, and a maximum error rate of 0.162%.

In this paper, we have reviewed and presented a critical overview of “energy-efficient and reliable routing solutions” in the field of wireless body area networks (WBANs). In addition, we have theoretically analysed the importance of energy efficiency and reliability and how it affects the stability and lifetime of WBANs. WBAN is a type of wireless sensor network (WSN) that is unique, wherever energy-efficient operations are one of the prime challenges, because each sensor node operates on battery, and where an excessive amount of communication consumes more energy than perceiving. Moreover, timely and reliable data delivery is essential in all WBAN applications. Moreover, the most frequent types of energy-efficient routing protocols include crosslayer, thermal-aware, cluster-based, quality-of-service, and postural movement-based routing protocols. According to the literature review, clustering-based routing algorithms are the best choice for WBAhinwidth, and low memory WBAN, in terms of more computational overhead and complexity. Thus, the routing techniques used in WBAN should be capable of energy-efficient communication at desired reliability to ensure the improved stability period and network lifetime. Therefore, we have highlighted and critically analysed various performance issues of the existing “energy-efficient and reliable routing solutions” for WBANs. Furthermore, we identified and compiled a tabular representation of the reviewed solutions based on the most appropriate strategy and performance parameters for WBAN. Finally, concerning to reliability and energy efficiency in WBANs, we outlined a number of issues and challenges that needs further consideration while devising new solutions for clustered-based WBANs.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have significantly impacted healthcare applications by giving the possibility of monitoring the patient’s physiological parameters using different sensors. The use of WSN and the wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) offers possible solutions for monitoring the health parameters in remote areas. On the other hand, the use of wireless communication medium and information security is the primary concern in WBANs. Because WBANs use the different small sensors placed on the human body to collect the physiological data. They need resource and computational restrictions, thus, building the use of complex and advanced encryption algorithms infeasible. It is essential in the WBAN to monitor and transmit the data to provide reliable and secure communication. Wrong and incomplete information can create difficulties in patient health which can be sometimes more dangerous. This gives the motivation to make such security protocols or algorithms to achieve high security in WBANs. So, the research has been currently focused on reliable communication between the doctor and patient, routing algorithms, and the data’s security by using various new technologies. This paper discusses the different security threats and solutions for designing healthcare applications and routing and layer attacks. Furthermore, the paper has been focused on the Data Distribution Service Models for data security. The paper also includes artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms in healthcare implemented by various companies.

In humanware applications, resource constrained sensor devices are tactically placed on human body to form Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Then the WBAN is used for monitoring biometrics and movements of human body. Keeping in mind the resource constrained devices, WBANs are treated just like wireless sensor networks when considering a solution for key management. However, WBANs differ from traditional wireless sensor networks in scale, topology and security requirements. Also, the WBANs can also use random values from biometric measurements for the generation of keys. These differences render the key management schemes of WSNs inefficient and overly complex for WBANs scenario. Therefore, we propose a key management scheme that is efficient and fulfills the security requirements of WBAN.

In recent years, interests in the application of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) have grown considerably. A WBAN can be used to develop a patient monitoring system which offers flexibility and mobility to patients. Use of a WBAN will also allow the flexibility of setting up a remote monitoring system via either the internet or an intranet. For such medical systems it is very important that a WBAN can collect and transmit data reliably, and in a timely manner to the monitoring entity. In this paper we examine the performance of an IEEE802.15.4/Zigbee MAC based WBAN operating in different patient monitoring environment. We study the performance of a remote patient monitoring system using an OPNET based simulation model.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is usually composed of nodes for contacting the body and coordinator for collecting the body data from the nodes. In this setup, the nodes are under constraint of the energy resource while the coordinator can be recharged and has relatively larger energy resource than the nodes. Therefore, the architecture mechanism of the networks must not allow the nodes to consume much energy. Primarily, Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols should be carefully designed to consider this issue, because the MAC layer has the key of the energy efficiency phenomenon (e.g., idle listening). Under these characteristics, we propose a new MAC protocol to satisfy the higher energy efficiency of nodes than coordinator by designing the asymmetrically energy-balanced model between nodes and coordinator. The proposed scheme loads the unavoidable energy consumption into the coordinator instead of the nodes to extend their lifetime. Additionally, the scheme also provides prioritization for the emergency data transmission with differentiated Quality of Service (QoS). For the evaluations, IEEE 802.15.6 was used for comparison.

In this paper, we focus on an interesting E-Health monitoring system that efficiently utilizes the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). Wireless body area network (WBAN) composed of a set of target-oriented sensors placed around the human body and transmit its collected data to a coordinator that carries it to some cloud system. WBAN standardized with the newly emerged IEEE802.15.6 with its specifications for Physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers only. Regrettably, the Network layer is not addressed by the standard where it plays an important role in the overall performance. In this paper, we design the temperature heterogeneity energy (THE) aware routing protocol for WBAN as a complement for the standard. “THE” aims to control the temperature raising caused by the on-body sensor and affects the skin comfortableness. In the meantime, “THE” maintains the network in high-performance conditions in terms of long node lifetime and high packet throughput. To fulfill these desired tradeoffs, the sensed data is classified into three data levels with variable transmission priority to each level, namely, emergency (abnormal) data priority 7 (highest priority), critical data priority 6, and normal data assigned priority 5. “THE” protocol is based on a utility function that chooses the WBAN's parent node (PN) that has the largest amount of remaining energy, the highest data rate, the minimum distance to the coordinator, and the minimum sensor's temperature. Hopping the data through the parent node (two-hops) is applicable for the data with normal priority while high priority data (critical and emergency) is transmitted to the coordinator in one-hop only. The proposed “THE” protocol's performance validation performed via Monte Carlo simulation analysis which proves that “THE” protocol achieved better performance against conventional protocols (SIMPLE and iM-SIMPLE) in terms of network lifetime, number of dead nodes, total remaining energy, and throughput.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) being a sub-domain of wireless sensor network (WSN) is a new emerging technology for healthcare applications. A WBAN consists of low-power tiny wireless nodes placed on or around the human body that continuously observe vital health signs of a patient. These sensors are capable of sending information of physiological parameters taken from human body to other devices for diagnosis procedures and prescription. WBAN provides ubiquitous healthcare services and enables greater mobility without restricting human normal activities, as the medical personnel can observe the patient health conditions based on the data received through the wireless network. This research work provides a WBAN based healthcare monitoring system that can provide the electrocardiogram (ECG), heartbeat, and human body temperature information. The wireless transmission of the received data from human body is performed by using Zigbee IEEE802.15.4 communication standard. The physiological data will be communicated to remote medical server where data is stored and analyzed. In case any disease is diagnosed, medical personnel can provide immediate assistance to the patients.

Technological evolvement of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) gave birth to an attractive research area for health monitoring called Body Sensor Network (BSN). In BSN tiny sensor nodes sense physiological data of patients under medical health care and transmit this data to Base Station (BS) and then forward to Medical Server (MS). BSN is exposed to security threats due to vulnerable wireless channel. Protection of human physiological data against adversaries is a major addressable issue while keeping constrained resources of BSN under consideration. Our proposed scheme consists of three stages. In first stage deployment of initial secret key by the ward Medical Officer (MO), in second stage secure key exchange and node authentication, in third stage secure data communication are performed. We have compared our proposed scheme with three existing schemes. Our scheme is efficient in computation cost, communication overhead and storage as compared to existing schemes while providing enough security against the adversaries.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is a communication technology, which aims providing both medical and consumer electronics services through sensor devices in, on, or around a human body. Due to the absence of the IEEE 802.15.6-based RF modules, the IEEE 802.15.4, a typical low-power communication technology of which requirements are similar, is considered to implement WBANs. In the case where a lot of WBANs coexist, meanwhile, collisions and signal attenuations may lead to their communication performance degradation. However, the IEEE 802.15.4 does not provide any solutions to solve coexistence problems, and thus, coexistence mitigation schemes for the IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs are necessary. In this paper, we perform preliminary experiments to identify aspects of coexistence problem among the coexisting IEEE 802.15.4-based WBANs. Based on the results of preliminary experiments, we also propose a hybrid channel access scheme to mitigate coexistence problems in WBANs. The proposed scheme can be classified into two phases. In the first phase, the proposed scheme provides probabilistic collision avoidance on the contention-free period. When the pre-defined requirements of reliability cannot be satisfied with performing the first phase, the proposed scheme performs the second phase, which helps to mitigate collision or interference through changing channel access method. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, we implement our scheme and perform experiments by comparing with an IEEE 802.15.4-based WBAN.

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is envisioned to became self-evident in future healthcare environments. One candidate to fulfill the reliably and efficiency requirements set by sending vital biomedical information is the novel IEEE 802.15.6 WBAN standard. In this paper, we study the effect of user priority scheme defined for different types of data in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard for medium access control (MAC) layer utilizing Slotted ALOHA channel access. A comparative performance analysis between the original IEEE 802.15.6-based communication system utilizing user priority scheme and a system utilizing a traditional random backoff scheme is presented in wireless hospital environment. Based on the results it can be stated that the performance of the IEEE 802.15.6 user priority scheme is approximately the same than the random backoff scheme in scenarios containing only high-priority medical data. However, in scenarios having both medical and low-priority nonmedical data transmissions the user priority scheme offers superior performance in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio for medical applications.

Personal health status is becoming a matter of concern while pressure of work growing gradually in everyday life, in the meantime, the ageing population needs more attention. Thanks to many challenging problems of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) solved, exploring work of human body monitoring based on WSNs achieved great progress, we called it wireless body sensor networks(BSNs). In this paper, we propose a novel health-monitoring system based on BSNs; we named it SENS-U. It consists of wireless multi-parameters monitoring terminals and two medical care centers; with human body, they form a remote human in loop 4 vital signs and ECG monitoring system.