Biosignal and context monitoring: Distributed multimedia applications of body area networks in healthcare

We are investigating the use of Body Area Networks (BANs), wearable sensors and wireless communications for measuring, processing, transmission, interpretation and display of biosignals. The goal is to provide telemonitoring and teletreatment services for patients. The remote health professional can view a multimedia display which includes graphical and numerical representation of patients’ biosignals. Addition of feedback-control enables teletreatment services; teletreatment can be delivered to the patient via multiple modalities including tactile, text, auditory and visual. We describe the health BAN and a generic mobile health service platform and two context aware applications. The epilepsy application illustrates processing and interpretation of multi-source, multimedia BAN data. The chronic pain application illustrates multi-modal feedback and treatment, with patients able to view their own biosignals on their handheld device

BANZKP: a Secure Authentication Scheme Using Zero Knowledge Proof for WBANs

-Wireless body area network(WBAN) has shown great potential in improving healthcare quality not only for patients but also for medical staff. However, security and privacy are still an important issue in WBANs especially in multi-hop architectures. In this paper, we propose and present the design and the evaluation of a secure lightweight and energy efficient authentication scheme BANZKP based on an efficient cryptographic protocol, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) and a commitment scheme. ZKP is used to confirm the identify of the sensor nodes, with small computational requirement, which is favorable for body sensors given their limited resources, while the commitment scheme is used to deal with replay attacks and hence the injection attacks by committing a message and revealing the key later. Our scheme reduces the memory requirement by 56.13 % compared to TinyZKP [13], the comparable alternative so far for Body Area Networks, and uses 10 % less energy

Survey on wireless body area sensor networks for healthcare applications: Signal processing, data analysis and feedback

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) technologies are considered as one of the key of the research areas in computer science and healthcare application industries.The wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) is a wireless network used for communication among sensor nodes operating on or inside the human body in order to monitor vital body parameters and movements.The paper surveys the state-of-the-art on WBASNs discussing the major components of research in this area including physiological sensing, data preprocessing, detection and classification of human related phenomena. We provide comparative studies of the technologies and techniques used in such systems

Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications: An Overview

Healthcare systems have been facing various new challenges due to increasing and rising aging population in healthcare. Advance information and communication technologies have introduced Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) for healthcare systems. WBANs provide different monitoring services in healthcare sector for monitoring their patients with more convenience. WBANs are economical solutions and non-invasive technology for healthcare applications. This review paper provides a comprehensive review on WBANs applications, services and recent challenges

Towards the fast and robust optimal design of Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks are wireless sensor networks whose adoption has recently emerged and spread in important healthcare applications, such as the remote monitoring of health conditions of patients. A major issue associated with the deployment of such networks is represented by energy consumption: in general, the batteries of the sensors cannot be easily replaced and recharged, so containing the usage of energy by a rational design of the network and of the routing is crucial. Another issue is represented by traffic uncertainty: body sensors may produce data at a variable rate that is not exactly known in advance, for example because the generation of data is event-driven. Neglecting traffic uncertainty may lead to wrong design and routing decisions, which may compromise the functionality of the network and have very bad effects on the health of the patients. In order to address these issues, in this work we propose the first robust optimization model for jointly optimizing the topology and the routing in body area networks under traffic uncertainty. Since the problem may result challenging even for a state-of-the-art optimization solver, we propose an original optimization algorithm that exploits suitable linear relaxations to guide a randomized fixing of the variables, supported by an exact large variable neighborhood search. Experiments on realistic instances indicate that our algorithm performs better than a state-of-the-art solver, fast producing solutions associated with improved optimality gaps.Comment: Authors' manuscript version of the paper that was published in Applied Soft Computin

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

A Power efficient pulsed MAC protocol for body area networks

The need for a reduction in healthcare cost has escalated over the past decade. Therefore, preventive medicine through remote health monitoring and Body Area Networks has gained more attention. This paper presents a novel Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol called Pulsed-MAC or simply PMAC to efficiently manage wireless communications in Body Area Networks. PMAC drastically extends the network life time by augmenting sensor nodes with charge pumping circuitry which harvest energy from a pulsed signal used to orchestrate communications. By measuring the average radio power consumption in a sensor node over a 24 hour simulation period, results show that PMAC outperforms conventional SMAC by up to three times and will easily allow for a Body Area Network to last beyond 200 days

Mobile Patient Monitoring: The Mobihealth System

The forthcoming wide availability of high bandwidth public wireless networks will give rise to new mobile healthcare services. To this end, the MobiHealth project has developed and trialed a highly customisable vital signs monitoring system based on a body area network (BAN) and a mobile-health (m-health) service platform utilising next generation public wireless networks. The developed system allows the incorporation of diverse medical sensors via wireless connections, and the live transmission of the measured vital signs over public wireless networks to healthcare providers. Nine trials with different healthcare scenarios and patient groups in four different European countries have been conducted. These have been performed to test the service and the network infrastructure including its suitability for mobile healthcare applications. Preliminary results have documented the feasibility of using the system, but also demonstrated logistical problems with use of the BANs and the infrastructure for transmitting mobile healthcare data