A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time and provide real-time updates of the patient's status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solutions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables. In V3, the manuscript is converted to LaTe

Using wearable sensors for remote healthcare monitoring system

Recent technological advances in wireless communications and wireless sensor networks have enabled the design of low-cost, intelligent, tiny, and lightweight medical sensor nodes that can be strategically placed on human body, create a wireless body area network (WBAN) to monitor various physiological vital signs for a long period of time and providing real-time feedback to the user and medical staff. WBANs promise to re-volutionize health monitoring. In this paper, medical sensors were used to collect physiological data from patients and transmit it to Intelligent Personal digital Assistant (IPDA) using ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 standard and to medical server using 3G communications. We introduced priority scheduling and data compression into the system to increase transmission rate of physiological critical signals which improve the bandwidth utilization. It also extends the life time of hand-held personal server by reducing power consumption during transmission

Using an ecological framework to design mobile technologies for pediatric asthma management

ABSTRACT Mobile technologies, due to their ubiquitous nature, play an important role in supporting health care. However, it is not easy to design useful integrated mobile services without a systematic understanding of users, and this is especially true for children. Therefore, we propose a new theoretical perspective for generating design concepts in the early stage of the design process. Our ecological model is based on Ecological Systems Theory which approaches development in terms of the child's relationships and environmental context. It leverages the fact that mobile technologies are deeply involved with users' circumstances. We argue that the ecological model can provide a heuristic to help researchers understand users' needs in context and generate concepts logically and creatively. Here we explore pediatric asthma management as a case study for this model. Finally, five promising mobile technology concepts are provided as examples for further development of mobile technologies related to pediatric asthma management

Determination of Personalized Asthma Triggers From Multimodal Sensing and a Mobile App: Observational Study

Background: Asthma is a chronic pulmonary disease with multiple triggers. It can be managed by strict adherence to an asthma care plan and by avoiding these triggers. Clinicians cannot continuously monitor their patients’ environment and their adherence to an asthma care plan, which poses a significant challenge for asthma management. Objective: In this study, pediatric patients were continuously monitored using low-cost sensors to collect asthma-relevant information. The objective of this study was to assess whether kHealth kit, which contains low-cost sensors, can identify personalized triggers and provide actionable insights to clinicians for the development of a tailored asthma care plan. Methods: The kHealth asthma kit was developed to continuously track the symptoms of asthma in pediatric patients and monitor the patients’ environment and adherence to their care plan for either 1 or 3 months. The kit consists of an Android app–based questionnaire to collect information on asthma symptoms and medication intake, Fitbit to track sleep and activity, the Peak Flow meter to monitor lung functions, and Foobot to monitor indoor air quality. The data on the patient’s outdoor environment were collected using third-party Web services based on the patient’s zip code. To date, 107 patients consented to participate in the study and were recruited from the Dayton Children’s Hospital, of which 83 patients completed the study as instructed. Results: Patient-generated health data from the 83 patients who completed the study were included in the cohort-level analysis. Of the 19% (16/83) of patients deployed in spring, the symptoms of 63% (10/16) and 19% (3/16) of patients suggested pollen and particulate matter (PM2.5), respectively, to be their major asthma triggers. Of the 17% (14/83) of patients deployed in fall, symptoms of 29% (4/17) and 21% (3/17) of patients suggested pollen and PM2.5, respectively, to be their major triggers. Among the 28% (23/83) of patients deployed in winter, PM2.5 was identified as the major trigger for 83% (19/23) of patients. Similar correlations were not observed between asthma symptoms and factors such as ozone level, temperature, and humidity. Furthermore, 1 patient from each season was chosen to explain, in detail, his or her personalized triggers by observing temporal associations between triggers and asthma symptoms gathered using the kHealth asthma kit. Conclusions: The continuous monitoring of pediatric asthma patients using the kHealth asthma kit generates insights on the relationship between their asthma symptoms and triggers across different seasons. This can ultimately inform personalized asthma management and intervention plans

Application of Wireless Sensor Networks to Healthcare Promotion

Born on military applications, wireless sensor networks(WSNs) application grew on the promise of environment sensing and data processing capability at low cost. These networks can hold hundreds or even thousands of smart sensing nodes with processing and sensing capabilities and even integrated power through a dedicated battery. This paper surveys on the application of wireless sensor networks to healthcare promotion, namely with the use of biosensor technology applied to body sensor networks. On a wireless body sensor network, a person wears biosensors to gather data, while doing their daily activities. Currently, engineers and medical staff are cooperating on findingnew ways to properly gather meaningful data on-site and achieve a convenient way to process these data for research and on-site medical decision. New challenges that such approach brings are also considered. Moreover, it is shown that wireless sensor networks provide the technology to built wireless sensing and create a convenient infrastructure for multiple data gathering in healthcare applications. Together with real successful examples, we demonstrate the great usefulness of wireless sensor networks in healthcare promotion. The paper concludes with some guidelines for future work

Розвиток методів енергозбереження в мобільних сенсорних мережах

Для досягнення мети в даній роботі вирішуються наступні завдання: - аналіз існуючих способів заощадження електроенергії при роботі датчика БСМ; - опис методу розподіленого кодування джерела; - математичне модулювання модифікованої схеми роботи датчика; - аналіз результатів математичного моделювання та порівняння енергоефективності з іншими схемами роботи датчика.To achieve the goal, the following tasks are solved in this work: - analysis of existing ways of saving electricity during the operation of the BSM sensor; - description of the method of distributed coding of the source; - mathematical modulation of the modified sensor operation scheme; - analysis of the results of mathematical modeling and comparison of energy efficiency with other schemes of sensor operation

Personal, spatiotemporal exposure assessment: method development and application

2013 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.To view the abstract, please see the full text of the document

A comprehensive review of wireless body area network

Recent development and advancement of information and communication technologies facilitate people in different dimensions of life. Most importantly, in the healthcare industry, this has become more and more involved with the information and communication technology-based services. One of the most important services is monitoring of remote patients, that enables the healthcare providers to observe, diagnose and prescribe the patients without being physically present. The advantage of miniaturization of sensor technologies gives the flexibility of installing in, on or off the body of patients, which is capable of forwarding physiological data wirelessly to remote servers. Such technology is named as Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In this paper, WBAN architecture, communication technologies for WBAN, challenges and different aspects of WBAN are illustrated. This paper also describes the architectural limitations of existing WBAN communication frameworks. blueFurthermore, implementation requirements are presented based on IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Finally, as a source of motivation towards future development of research incorporating Software Defined Networking (SDN), Energy Harvesting (EH) and Blockchain technology into WBAN are also provided