Ubiquitous Computing for Remote Cardiac Patient Monitoring: A Survey

New wireless technologies, such as wireless LAN and sensor networks, for telecardiology purposes give new possibilities for monitoring vital parameters with wearable biomedical sensors, and give patients the freedom to be mobile and still be under continuous monitoring and thereby better quality of patient care. This paper will detail the architecture and quality-of-service (QoS) characteristics in integrated wireless telecardiology platforms. It will also discuss the current promising hardware/software platforms for wireless cardiac monitoring. The design methodology and challenges are provided for realistic implementation

A Novel Framework for Software Defined Wireless Body Area Network

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained huge popularity in replacing traditional network by offering flexible and dynamic network management. It has drawn significant attention of the researchers from both academia and industries. Particularly, incorporating SDN in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications indicates promising benefits in terms of dealing with challenges like traffic management, authentication, energy efficiency etc. while enhancing administrative control. This paper presents a novel framework for Software Defined WBAN (SDWBAN), which brings the concept of SDN technology into WBAN applications. By decoupling the control plane from data plane and having more programmatic control would assist to overcome the current lacking and challenges of WBAN. Therefore, we provide a conceptual framework for SDWBAN with packet flow model and a future direction of research pertaining to SDWBAN.Comment: Presented on 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulatio

Wireless body sensor networks for health-monitoring applications

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Physiological Measurement. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/29/11/R01

A priority-based energy efficient multi-hop routing protocol with congestion control for wireless body area network

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are advanced and integrated monitoring networks for healthcare applications. In these networks, different types of Biomedical Sensor Nodes (BSNs) are used to monitor physiological parameters of the human body. The BSNs have limited resources such as energy, memory and computation power. These limited resources make the network challenging especially in terms of energy consumption. Efficient routing schemes are required to save the energy during communication processes. Additionally, the BSNs generate sensitive and non-sensitive data packets, which need to be routed according to their priority. In order to address these problems, a priority-based Energy Efficient Multihop Routing protocol with congestion control (3EMR) for wireless body area network was developed that comprises of three different schemes. First, an Optimal Next-hop Selection (ONS) scheme was developed based on the cost function of routing parameters to dynamically select best next-hop for forwarding data packets. Second, a Priority Based Routing (PBR) scheme was developed to forward data packets according to data priority, which is based on sensitivity of the data with regards to patience’s life. Third, a Congestion Avoidance and Mitigation (CAM) scheme was developed to save energy consumption and packet loss due to congestion by considering packet flow adjustment and congestion zone avoidance based strategy. It improvement is benchmarked against related solutions, and they are Healthcare-aware Optimized Congestion Avoidance (HOCA), Differentiated Rate control for Congestion (DRC), Priority based Cross Layer Routing (PCLR), Even Energy-consumption and Backside Routing (EEBR), and Energy Efficient Routing (EER) scheme. The simulation results demonstrated that the 3EMR scheme achieved significant improvement in terms of increased network lifetime by 31.4%, increased throughput by 33.2%, reduced packet loss 30.9%, increased packet delivery ratio by 21.1% and reduced energy consumption 26.8%. Thus, the proposed routing scheme has proven to be an energy efficient solution for data communication in wireless body area networks

Congestion control mechanism for sensor-cloud Infrastructure

 This thesis has developed a sensor-Cloud system that integrates WBANs with Cloud computing to enable real-time sensor data collection, storage, processing, sharing and management. As the main contribution of this study, a congestion detection and control protocol is proposed to ensure acceptable data flows are maintained during the network lifetime

Wearable and Implantable Wireless Sensor Network Solutions for Healthcare Monitoring

Wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies are considered one of the key research areas in computer science and the healthcare application industries for improving the quality of life. The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of current developments and future direction of research on wearable and implantable body area network systems for continuous monitoring of patients. This paper explains the important role of body sensor networks in medicine to minimize the need for caregivers and help the chronically ill and elderly people live an independent life, besides providing people with quality care. The paper provides several examples of state of the art technology together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provides a comprehensive analysis of the various benefits and drawbacks of these systems. Although offering significant benefits, the field of wearable and implantable body sensor networks still faces major challenges and open research problems which are investigated and covered, along with some proposed solutions, in this paper

The role of cross-layered designs in wireless body area network

With recent advancement, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) plays an important role to detect various diseases of a patient in advance and informs the medical team about the life threatening situation. WBAN comprises of small intelligent Biomedical sensors which are implanted inside patient body and attached on the surface of a patient to monitor different vital signs, namely; respiratory rate, ECG, EMG, temperature, blood pressure, glucose. The routing layer of WBAN has the same challenging problems as similarly faced in WSN but the unique challenge is the temperature-rise during monitoring of vital signs and data transmission. IEEE 802.15.6 MAC Superframe of WBAN is different from IEEE 802.15.4 MAC of WSN and provides channels to emergency and non-emergency data for transmission. As similarly seen in WSN, PHY layer of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 provide various modulation techniques for data transmission. The purpose of this study is to familiar with routing layer, MAC layer and PHY layer in the cross-layer design of WBA