Body Area Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a research hotspot in recent years and has yielded many fruitful results. However, the biomedical applications of WSN haven’t received significant development due to its many unique challenges for the engineers and physicians. In this paper, a system architecture solution of body area network (BAN), our so called project “MediMesh”, is presented. A biomedical dedicated BAN node hardware platform is devised to fit the medical monitoring application. The sensor node is built up especially for healthcare monitoring while the biocompatibility and portability are considered. A light weight network protocol is designed considering the radiation effect and communication overhead. After data acquisition from sink stations, a data publishing system based on web service technology is implemented for typical hospital environment. The publishing of biomedical data is realized through 3 phases: first storing the data automatically in a database, then creating information sharing service by using Web Service technology, and finally allowing data access by the physicians and end users.

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power microelectronics and miniaturization, and wireless networking enabled the design and proliferation of wireless sensor networks capable of autonomously monitoring and controlling environments. One of the most promising ...

It is anticipated that wearable wireless sensors in body area network (BAN) will increase the functionality of lifestyle and health care devices to gradually match the needs of society by year 2010 and people will carry their personal Body Area Network. The applications in areas like lifestyle, assisted living, sports, entertainment functionalities, toxic levels in the lungs of a Fire-Fighter, radiation exposure in war zones etc are already being explored.

Medical MoteCare is a health monitoring system prototype suitable for monitoring the elderly and the infirm. The system utilizes a wireless sensor network of MicaZ motes equipped with pulse oximeter sensors and environmental sensors, namely temperature and light. The system is based on the adaptation of three-tier and SNMP proxy network management organizational model. A key feature of the system is the use of two proprietary network management tools to monitor personal health parameters and provide timely alerts when thresholds are reached.

In order to provide relevant information to mobile users, such as workers engaging in the manual tasks of maintenance and assembly, a wearable computer requires information about the user’s specific activities. This work,focuses on the recognition of activities that are characterized by a hand motion and an accompanying,sound. Suitable activities can be found in assembly and maintenance work. Here,

This paper presents a flexible textile antenna working at 2.4 GHz suitable for wireless body area networks. The antenna is composed of leather and copper tape. Such simple structure makes the antenna flexible, cheap and easy to be reproduced. The antenna has been simulated in CST microwave studio. A prototype of the proposed antenna is also fabricated. Numerical and measured results are compared in terms of reflection coefficient. Performances are also evaluated in terms of voltage standing wave ratio, radiation pattern and directivity. The antenna offers a 4.27dB gain with 64.65% radiation efficiency. Performance of the antenna near human body has also been monitored. It is observed that the resonant frequency shifts downward when the antenna is placed on the human body. Keywords— Textile Antenna, Return loss, Wireless Body Area Network.

Body Area Networks (BANs) are an emerging area of wireless personal communications. The IEEE 802.15.6 working group aims to develop a communications standard optimised for low power devices operating on, in or around the human body. IEEE 802.15.6 specifically targets low power medical application areas. The IEEE 802.15.6 draft defines two main channel access modes; contention based and contention free. This paper examines the energy lifetime performance of contention free access and in particular of periodic scheduled allocations. This paper presents an overview of the IEEE 802.15.6 and an analytical model for estimating the device lifetime. The analysis determines the maximum device lifetime for a range of scheduled allocations. It also shows that the higher the data rate of frame transfers the longer the device lifetime. Finally, the energy savings provided by block transfers are quantified and compared to immediately acknowledged alternatives.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been recently promoted to monitor the physiological parameters of patient in an unobtrusive and natural way. This paper towards to make advantage of those ongoing wireless communication links between the body sensors to provide estimated position information of patients or particular body area networks, which make daily activity surveillance possible for further analysis. The proposed particle filtering based localization algorithm just picks up the received radio signal strength information from beacons or its neighbors to infer its own pose, which do not require additional hardware or instruments. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments are presented to examine the performance of location estimating method.

—Implanted medical sensors and actuators within the human body will enable remote data gathering, diagnosis, and the ability to directly control drug delivery actuators. To establish the communication links through the body tissues, we adopt galvanic coupling that uses low frequency electrical signals of weak amplitude. In this paper, we propose a topology management strategy using Weiszfeld algorithm that attempts to minimize the transmission power of the body nodes by reducing the distance from the source nodes to pickup points or relays that gather and forward the received information. It takes into account the unique propagation model of the electrical signals within the body at various tissue layers, which is completely different from over the air RF. Our algorithm considers separately the constraints of on-skin nodes and the implanted nodes, especially in terms of minimizing the energy for the latter, which cannot be easily retrieved and recharged. It also considers the difference in specific bandwidth requirements for the applications running within the nodes, by moving relays closer towards the high data rate demanding regions. We show that by optimizing the position of the relay node, the energy consumption can be significantly improved to extend the lifetime of the intra-body network up to several years.

Abstract—Recent technological advances in sensors, lowpower integrated circuits, and wireless communications have enabled the design of low-cost, miniature, lightweight, intelligent physiological sensor platforms that can be seamlessly integrated into a body area network for health monitoring. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for extended periods of time and near real-time updates of patients ’ medical records through the Internet. A number of innovative systems for health monitoring have recently been proposed. However, they typically rely on custom communication protocols and hardware designs, lacking generality and flexibility. The lack of standard platforms, system software support, and standards makes these systems expensive. Bulky sensors, high price, and frequent battery changes are all likely to limit user compliance. To address some of these challenges, we prototyped a WBAN utilizing a common off-the-shelf wireless sensor ...

In Body Area Networks (BANs), quality of service is
needed to provide reliable data communication over prioritized
data streams coming from energy constrained sensors attached
to, or possibly implanted in, patients. In this work, we focus on
BAN for real-time data streaming applications, where the realtime
nature of data streams is of critical importance for providing
a useful and efficient sensorial feedback for the user while system
lifetime should be maximized. Thus, bandwidth, throughput and
energy efficiency of the communication protocol must be carefully
optimized. In this paper, we present an Energy-Balanced Rate
Assignment and Routing Protocol (EBRAR). EBRAR selects
routes based on the residual energy, thus, instead of continuously
routing data through an optimized (energy efficient) fixed path,
the data is transported more intelligently and the burden of
forwarding the data is more equally spread among the nodes.
Another unique property of EBRAR is its ability to provide
adaptive resource allocation. Our experimental results show that
the proposed protocol performs well in terms of balancing energy
consumption across the BAN and thus guarantees longer network
lifetime.