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

Design of a Customized multipurpose nano-enabled implantable system for in-vivo theranostics

The first part of this paper reviews the current development and key issues on implantable multi-sensor devices for in vivo theranostics. Afterwards, the authors propose an innovative biomedical multisensory system for in vivo biomarker monitoring that could be suitable for customized theranostics applications. At this point, findings suggest that cross-cutting Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) could improve the overall performance of the system given that the convergence of technologies in nanotechnology, biotechnology, micro&nanoelectronics and advanced materials permit the development of new medical devices of small dimensions, using biocompatible materials, and embedding reliable and targeted biosensors, high speed data communication, and even energy autonomy. Therefore, this article deals with new research and market challenges of implantable sensor devices, from the point of view of the pervasive system, and time-to-market. The remote clinical monitoring approach introduced in this paper could be based on an array of biosensors to extract information from the patient. A key contribution of the authors is that the general architecture introduced in this paper would require minor modifications for the final customized bio-implantable medical device

Système implantable pour la mesure de la pression vésicale et analyse prédictive de la miction

L’incontinence et les autres pathologies liées aux troubles du système urinaire inférieur peuvent causer de très profonds traumas psychologiques, en plus de limiter l’autonomie des patients. En effet, ce sujet, toujours tabou, est très difficile à évoquer. Ainsi, de nombreuses personnes en souffrent d’autant plus qu’elles n’osent pas en parler à leurs proches ou leurs médecins. Pourtant, des solutions existent, notamment des sphincters artificiels qui permettent d’éviter les fuites involontaires d’urine, en particulier chez les paraplégiques et les tétraplégiques. Cependant, ces solutions, bien qu’efficaces, ne sont pas optimales. N’ayant pas la sensation d’envie, les patients ne peuvent savoir lorsque leur vessie est pleine. Ceci limite donc grandement leur autonomie. En effet, une vessie trop pleine (volume supérieur à 600 mL) peut mener à de graves infections et même menacer la vie du patient. La mesure du volume de la vessie est possible par échographie et peut se substituer au sondage pour évaluer la rétention urinaire et rechercher des résidus post-mictionnels par exemple avec le Bladder-scan BVI-3000®. Cette méthode, non-invasive, ne permet cependant pas de prédire la miction. Elle n’est, de plus, pas vraiment portable. Ainsi, plutôt que de mesurer le volume de la vessie, la mesure de la pression du détrusor – muscle recouvrant les parois de la vessie – est beaucoup plus intéressante et utile. Cette dernière se calcule par la soustraction de la pression abdominale à la pression vésicale. La mesure de cette pression peut être faite par un implant, ce qui est invasif, mais limite les risques d’infection tout en maximisant le confort du patient. Pour cette maîtrise, le travail effectué s’appuie sur la réalisation, le développement et le prototypage d’un tel implant dans un souci de biocompatibilité et d’acceptation chez l’être humain. Par ailleurs, et faisant suite au développement de cet implant, un travail sur la prédiction de la miction chez le rat a été réalisé. Dans cette étude, l’utilisation d’algorithmes d’apprentissages solides nécessitant une faible puissance de calcul a été favorisée. À terme, cela permettra une intégration facile dans des implants vésicaux. La pertinence des résultats permet d’envisager des études plus poussées et complètes, notamment en augmentant la taille des bases de données utilisées. Pour cela, une génération de courbes temporelles de pression de la vessie par modélisation informatique a été tentée, qui n’est malheureusement pas encore concluante.----------ABSTRACT Urinary incontinence (UI) and the other lower urinary tracts symptoms are both limiting convalescents’ autonomy and psychologic well-being. Indeed, this subject is still taboo in most part of the world. For people suffering from UI, it is very difficult to bring the subject with their relatives or their doctors. However, solutions exist, for instance, artificial sphincters allow to avoid involuntary leakage of urine in particularly for tetraplegic or paraplegic. Nevertheless, these solutions are efficient, but the patients cannot know whether their bladder is full or empty. Patients’ autonomy is then still low – they cannot be far from a bathroom for more than two hours. Though, having a more than 600 mL bladder volume can lead to serious infections and even threaten the patient’s life. Ultrasounds, for instance the Bladder-scan BVI-3000® device, allow the measurement of the bladder volume. It can be used instead of catheter to measure the volume of retained urine or post-urination residue. However, this non-invasive method cannot help to predict micturition. Moreover, this device cannot be easily carried out. Therefore, the measurement of the detrusor pressure – the muscle of the bladder wall – is far more useful. This pressure is computed by subtracting the abdominal pressure to the vesical pressure. The measurement of the pressure is done by invasive implants, which has some obvious drawbacks, but avoid infection risks and maximize the patient comfort. The presented master work relies on the realisation, the development and the prototyping of such an implant in a care of human biocompatibility. Besides, following the implant development, the main work consists of finding a way to predict voiding. It was executed with data on rats having normal and overactive bladder conditions. The prediction was done thanks to machine learning algorithm, which minimize power consumption in order to allow an integration of this algorithm in an embedded device. Our positive results confirm the possibility of predicting voiding and allow to consider new studies with larger set of data. Generating data with the help of an informatic modeling was tried. Unfortunately, our results still present some flaws in terms of similarity with a typical bladder pressure curve in rats

Towards long-term intracranial pressure monitoring based on implantable wireless microsystems and wireless sensor networks

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) aims to provide support to healthcare professionals making use of sensing, and information and communication technologies. Brain related information is becoming more and more relevant for many pathologies, but access to long-term information from brain to feed such AAL technologies is still giving the first steps. One main issue when recording signal from the brain is the available room for sensing device placement. Since available room is limited, battery-less solutions are welcome. Also, AAL solutions to be developed should consider not only the sensing device, but also the entire supporting framework. This paper introduces a solution for long-term monitoring of intracranial pressure using a wireless microdevice and a wireless sensor network. This work introduces a solution to achieve an enough miniaturized pressure sensor, powered by a wireless link, and analyzes the suitability of a wireless sensor network to support the data dissemination.This work was supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology: FCT-PTDC/EEI-TEL/2881/2012, Programa Operacional Temático Fatores de Competitividade (COMPETE) and Fundo Comunitário Europeu FEDER. 2015info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Recent Advances on Implantable Wireless Sensor Networks

Implantable electronic devices are undergoing a miniaturization age, becoming more efficient and yet more powerful as well. Biomedical sensors are used to monitor a multitude of physiological parameters, such as glucose levels, blood pressure and neural activity. A group of sensors working together in the human body is the main component of a body area network, which is a wireless sensor network applied to the human body. In this chapter, applications of wireless biomedical sensors are presented, along with state-of-the-art communication and powering mechanisms of these devices. Furthermore, recent integration methods that allow the sensors to become smaller and more suitable for implantation are summarized. For individual sensors to become a body area network (BAN), they must form a network and work together. Issues that must be addressed when developing these networks are detailed and, finally, mobility methods for implanted sensors are presented

Wireless Power Transfer Techniques for Implantable Medical Devices:A Review

Wireless power transfer (WPT) systems have become increasingly suitable solutions for the electrical powering of advanced multifunctional micro-electronic devices such as those found in current biomedical implants. The design and implementation of high power transfer efficiency WPT systems are, however, challenging. The size of the WPT system, the separation distance between the outside environment and location of the implanted medical device inside the body, the operating frequency and tissue safety due to power dissipation are key parameters to consider in the design of WPT systems. This article provides a systematic review of the wide range of WPT systems that have been investigated over the last two decades to improve overall system performance. The various strategies implemented to transfer wireless power in implantable medical devices (IMDs) were reviewed, which includes capacitive coupling, inductive coupling, magnetic resonance coupling and, more recently, acoustic and optical powering methods. The strengths and limitations of all these techniques are benchmarked against each other and particular emphasis is placed on comparing the implanted receiver size, the WPT distance, power transfer efficiency and tissue safety presented by the resulting systems. Necessary improvements and trends of each WPT techniques are also indicated per specific IMD

Modelling and characterisation of antennas and propagation for body-centric wireless communication

PhDBody-Centric Wireless Communication (BCWC) is a central point in the development of fourth generation mobile communications. The continuous miniaturisation of sensors, in addition to the advancement in wearable electronics, embedded software, digital signal processing and biomedical technologies, have led to a new concept of usercentric networks, where devices can be carried in the user’s pockets, attached to the user’s body or even implanted. Body-centric wireless networks take their place within the personal area networks, body area networks and body sensor networks which are all emerging technologies that have a broad range of applications such as healthcare and personal entertainment. The major difference between BCWC and conventional wireless systems is the radio channel over which the communication takes place. The human body is a hostile environment from radio propagation perspective and it is therefore important to understand and characterise the effect of the human body on the antenna elements, the radio channel parameters and hence the system performance. This is presented and highlighted in the thesis through a combination of experimental and electromagnetic numerical investigations, with a particular emphasis to the numerical analysis based on the finite-difference time-domain technique. The presented research work encapsulates the characteristics of the narrowband (2.4 GHz) and ultra wide-band (3-10 GHz) on-body radio channels with respect to different digital phantoms, body postures, and antenna types hence highlighting the effect of subject-specific modelling, static and dynamic environments and antenna performance on the overall body-centric network. The investigations covered extend further to include in-body communications where the radio channel for telemetry with medical implants is also analysed by considering the effect of different digital phantoms on the radio channel characteristics. The study supports the significance of developing powerful and reliable numerical modelling to be used in conjunction with measurement campaigns for a comprehensive understanding of the radio channel in body-centric wireless communication. It also emphasises the importance of considering subject-specific electromagnetic modelling to provide a reliable prediction of the network performance