Cloud-assisted body area networks: state-of-the-art and future challenges

Body area networks (BANs) are emerging as enabling technology for many human-centered application domains such as health-care, sport, fitness, wellness, ergonomics, emergency, safety, security, and sociality. A BAN, which basically consists of wireless wearable sensor nodes usually coordinated by a static or mobile device, is mainly exploited to monitor single assisted livings. Data generated by a BAN can be processed in real-time by the BAN coordinator and/or transmitted to a server-side for online/offline processing and long-term storing. A network of BANs worn by a community of people produces large amount of contextual data that require a scalable and efficient approach for elaboration and storage. Cloud computing can provide a flexible storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis of body sensor data streams. In this paper, we motivate the introduction of Cloud-assisted BANs along with the main challenges that need to be addressed for their development and management. The current state-of-the-art is overviewed and framed according to the main requirements for effective Cloud-assisted BAN architectures. Finally, relevant open research issues in terms of efficiency, scalability, security, interoperability, prototyping, dynamic deployment and management, are discussed

Embedded self-healing layer for detecting and recovering sensor faults in body sensor networks

Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have proved to be a suitable technology for supporting the monitoring of physical and physiological activities of the human body. However, avoiding erroneous behavior of WBSN-based systems is an issue of fundamental importance, especially for critical health-care applications. In this regard, proper self-healing techniques should be able to fulfill requirements such as fault tolerance and reliability by detecting, and possibly recovering, faults and errors at runtime. In this paper, we focus on data faults, by first studying the impact of corrupted data, affecting sensed data by different kind of data-fault models, on the accuracy of a human activity recognition system. Then, we describe how the SPINE-* framework is able to enhance the WBSN system by adding instrumental autonomic elements providing the necessary self-healing operations. We find that the use of autonomic elements makes the system much more efficient and reliable thanks to its improved tolerance to data faults, as demonstrated by experimental results

Embedded self-healing layer for detecting and recovering sensor faults in body sensor networks

Wireless Body Sensor Networks (WBSNs) have proved to be a suitable technology for supporting the monitoring of physical and physiological activities of the human body. However, avoiding erroneous behavior of WBSN-based systems is an issue of fundamental importance, especially for critical health-care applications. In this regard, proper self-healing techniques should be able to fulfill requirements such as fault tolerance and reliability by detecting, and possibly recovering, faults and errors at runtime. In this paper, we focus on data faults, by first studying the impact of corrupted data, affecting sensed data by different kind of data-fault models, on the accuracy of a human activity recognition system. Then, we describe how the SPINE-* framework is able to enhance the WBSN system by adding instrumental autonomic elements providing the necessary self-healing operations. We find that the use of autonomic elements makes the system much more efficient and reliable thanks to its improved tolerance to data faults, as demonstrated by experimental results

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): A Survey on Reliability, Fault Tolerance, and Technologies Coexistence

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a key element in e-health to monitor bodies. This technology enables new applications under the umbrella of different domains, including the medical field, the entertainment and ambient intelligence areas. This survey paper places substantial emphasis on the concept and key features of the WBAN technology. First, the WBAN concept is introduced and a review of key applications facilitated by this networking technology is provided. The study then explores a wide variety of communication standards and methods deployed in this technology. Due to the sensitivity and criticality of the data carried and handled by WBAN, fault tolerance is a critical issue and widely discussed in this paper. Hence, this survey investigates thoroughly the reliability and fault tolerance paradigms suggested for WBANs. Open research and challenging issues pertaining to fault tolerance, coexistence and interference management and power consumption are also discussed along with some suggested trends in these aspect