A survey on wireless body area networks for eHealthcare systems in residential environments

The progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to the base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments

Dictionary memory based software architecture for distributed bluetooth low energy host controllers enabling high coverage in consumer residential healthcare environments

Technology has been seen as a possible solution to the increasing costs of healthcare and the globally aging population. It is known that many elderly people prefer to stay in their homes for as long as possible and remote monitoring can be a solution, but often such systems lack useful information or are prohibitive due to cost, ease of use/deployment and wireless coverage. This work presents a novel gateway software architecture based on threads being managed by dictionary memory. The architecture has been deployed in a distributed interconnected set of low-cost consumer grade gateway devices using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that are positioned around the home. The gateway devices can then be used to listen, monitor or connect to BLE based healthcare sensors to continually reveal information about the user with full residential coverage. A further novelty of this work is the ability to maintain handover connections between many sensors and many gateways as a user moves throughout their home, thus the gateways can route information to/from sensors across the consumer’s home network. The system has been tested in an experimental house and is now poised to be initially deployed to 100 homes for residential healthcare monitoring before any public mass consumer deployment

Detailed examination of a packet collision model for Bluetooth Low Energy advertising mode

The aim of this paper is to investigate the amount of energy that is required to successfully transmit information inside the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising packets. There are applications that require more than one BLE node to simultaneously transmit data. The BLE protocol utilizes a specific communication method termed advertising mode to perform unidirectional broadcasts of data from the advertising devices. However, with an increased number of BLE devices advertising simultaneously, there will be inevitable packet collisions from the advertising devices. This results in a waste of energy, specifically in low-power applications where lower consumption is desirable to minimize the need for battery replacements. This paper examines a packet collision model for the BLE advertising mode with the results validated using experimental data. Our analysis shows that when the throughput of the BLE network starts to fall due to an increase in the number of packet collisions, the energy consumption of the BLE nodes increase exponentially with respect to the number of nodes

Implementation of Wireless Body Area Network Based Patient Monitoring System

WBAN has gained considerable attention and became an emerging technology at health services due to its wide range of utilities and important role to improve the human health. The proposed system consists of different components, Pulse rate sensor which uses the optical technology to detect the flow of blood. Temperature sensor is used to measure the temperature from the body. Peripheral hemoglobin oxygen saturation (SpO2), blood pressure and electrocardiogram (ECG) are measured by the nurses. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader with passive tags is used to identify the patient. Arduino UNO microcontroller is used for data processing. The patient parameters are transmitted via Bluetooth technology to the base station. The base station which is Raspberry Pi (RPi) B model 3 used to receive the collected data and acts as the web server, so the physician accesses RPi to display different information. The obtained results from different cases prove the high performance of the system and sensor nodes that are designed. The overall system operates within different environments conditions. If one sensor node is fall down, the other nodes are still operate and do not affect. Also we improve the speed of the system response. The usage of wireless communication to send the data instead of the wired one as it provides a greater mobility to the device. The cost is also minimized by utilizing the feature of sending multiple parameters via a single node. Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Patient Monitoring, Biomedical, sensors, Microcontroller, Arduino, Raspberry Pi.

Channel gain for a wrist-to-arm scenario in the 55-65 GHz frequency band

Wireless communication on the body is expected to become more important in the future. This communication will in certain scenarios benefit from higher frequencies of operation and their associated smaller antennas and potentially higher bandwidths. One of these scenarios is communication between a wristband and wearable sensors on the arm. In order to investigate the feasibility of such a scenario, propagation at 55â65 GHz along the arm is measured for two configurations. First, for increasing separation distances along the arm, and second for a transmitter is rotationally placed around the wrist. Two channel gain models are fitted to the data and used to obtain a channel gain exponent in the first configuration and loss per angle of rotation in the second configuration. These models are relevant inputs for the design of future wearable wireless systems

Implementasi Zigbee Transceiver Untuk Akuisisi Data Sensor Inersia Pada Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN)

Laju pertambahan  jumlah penduduk yang membutuhkan layanan kesehatan di Indonesia tidak berbanding lurus dengan penambahan jumlah fasilitas kesehatan yang ada. Salah satu solusi alternatif yang dapat digunakan untuk mengatasi masalah tersebut adalah dengan mengembangkan teknologi  Wireless Body Area Network  (WBAN)  sebagai alat bantu layanan  kesehatan.  WBAN  adalah suatu sistem terpadu yang  terdiri atas sekelompok modul sensor yang terdistribusi dan terhubung secara nirkabel pada suatu topologi jaringan  tertentu dan berfungsi untuk mengekstrak dan berbagi informasi untuk diolah sesuai bidang aplikasinya.  Salah satu aplikasi WBAN adalah untuk  analisis gait atau metode untuk mempelajari pola berjalan manusia.  Untuk melakukan proses  analisis gait secara optimal dibutuhkan instrumen sensor  inersia  yang terpasang pada tubuh pasien yang merekam data gait dari pasien. Data dari pasien lalu dikirimkan melalui protokol komunikasi nirkabel ZigBee ke  network  coordinator  yang  berfungsi sebagai pengumpul data.  Jaringan  memiliki  topologi dalam bentuk  star dengan data rate  dari sensor  sebesar  50 Hz.  Data dari  network coordinator  kemudian dibaca pada  PC yang  telah dilengkapi perangkat lunak pengolah data untuk diolah  lebih lanjut.  Sistem diuji pada ruangan koridor sejauh 4 meter dengan nilai RSSI atau kuat sinyal bernilai paling kecil sebesar -64 dBm. Dalam hal konsumsi daya, sensor node dapat digunakan secara berkelanjutan dalam jangka waktu 2 jam 25 meni

Developing residential wireless sensor networks for ECG healthcare monitoring

Wireless technology development has increased rapidly due to it’s convenience and cost effectiveness compared to wired applications, particularly considering the advantages offered by Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based applications. Such applications exist in several domains including healthcare, medical, industrial and home automation. In the present study, a home-based wireless ECG monitoring system using Zigbee technology is considered. Such systems can be useful for monitoring people in their own home as well as for periodic monitoring by physicians for appropriate healthcare, allowing people to live in their home for longer. Health monitoring systems can continuously monitor many physiological signals and offer further analysis and interpretation. The characteristics and drawbacks of these systems may affect the wearer’s mobility during monitoring the vital signs. Real-time monitoring systems record, measure, and monitor the heart electrical activity while maintaining the consumer’s comfort. Zigbee devices can offer low-power, small size, and a low-cost suitable solution for monitoring the ECG signal in the home, but such systems are often designed in isolation, with no consideration of existing home control networks and smart home solutions. The present study offers a state of the art review and then introduces the main concepts and contents of the wireless ECG monitoring systems. In addition, models of the ECG signal and the power consumption formulas are highlighted. Challenges and future perspectives are also reported. The paper concludes that such mass-market health monitoring systems will only be prevalent when implemented together with home environmental monitoring and control systems

WBSN in IoT health-based application: toward delay and energy consumption minimizing

The wireless body sensor network (WBSN) technologies are one of the essential technologies of the Internet of things (IoT) growths of the healthcare paradigm, where every patient is monitored through a group of small-powered and lightweight sensor nodes. Thus, energy consumption is a major issue in WBSN. The major causes of energy wastage in WBSN are collisions and retransmission process. However, the major cause of the collision happened when two sensors are attempting to transmit data at exactly the same time and same frequency, and the major cause of the retransmission process happened when the collision takes place or data does not received properly due to channel fading. In this paper, we proposed a cognitive cooperative communication with two master nodes, namely, as two cognitive master nodes (TCMN), which can eliminate the collision and reduce the retransmission process. First, a complete study of a scheme is investigated in terms of network architecture. Second, a mathematical model of the link and outage probability of the proposed protocol are derived. Third, the end-to-end delay, throughput, and energy consumption are analyzed and investigated. The simulation and numerical results show that the TCMN can do system performance under general conditions with respect to direct transmission mode (DTM) and existing work

Secure store and forward proxy for dynamic IoT applications over M2M networks

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are expected to generate a huge unforeseen amount of traffic flowing from Consumer Electronics devices to the network. In order to overcome existing interoperability problems, several standardization bodies have joined to bring a new generation of Machine to Machine (M2M) networks as a result of the evolution of wireless sensor/actor networks and mobile cellular networks to converged networks. M2M is expected to enable IoT paradigms and related concepts into a reality at a reasonable cost. As part of the convergence, several technologies preventing new IoT services to interfere with existing Internet services are flourishing. Responsive, message-driven, resilient and elastic architectures are becoming essential parts of the system. These architectures will control the entire data flow for an IoT system requiring sometimes to store, shape and forward data among nodes of a M2M network to improve network performance. However, IoT generated data have an important personal component since it is generated in personal devices or are the result of the observation of the physical world, so rises significant security concerns. This article proposes a novel opportunistic flexible secure store and forward proxy for M2M networks and its mapping to asynchronous protocols that guarantees data confidentiality