QoS in Body Area Networks: A survey

Body Area Networks (BANs) are becoming increasingly popular and have shown great potential in real-time monitoring of the human body. With the promise of being cost-effective and unobtrusive and facilitating continuous monitoring, BANs have attracted a wide range of monitoring applications, including medical and healthcare, sports, and rehabilitation systems. Most of these applications are real time and life critical and require a strict guarantee of Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of timeliness, reliability, and so on. Recently, there has been a number of proposals describing diverse approaches or frameworks to achieve QoS in BANs (i.e., for different layers or tiers and different protocols). This survey put these individual efforts into perspective and presents a more holistic view of the area. In this regard, this article identifies a set of QoS requirements for BAN applications and shows how these requirements are linked in a three-tier BAN system and presents a comprehensive review of the existing proposals against those requirements. In addition, open research issues, challenges, and future research directions in achieving these QoS in BANs are highlighted.</jats:p

Design of a wireless platform for wearable and home automation applications

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on October 2, 2012Thesis advisor: Walter D. León-SalasVitaIncludes bibliographic references (p. 147-[151])Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2012In the recent past, a great deal of attention has been given to wireless sensors. Wireless sensors enable a multitude of applications such as environmental monitoring, medical care, disaster response, home automation, urban scale monitoring, gaming etc. These small, low-power, multifunctional sensors includes sensing, data processing and communication components representing a significant improvement over the traditional sensors. The two attractive wireless sensor applications investigated in this thesis are wearable sensors for bio-medical applications and a ZigBee wireless network for home automation applications. The targeted bio-medical application is bone strain monitoring. The current setup to collect strain data is composed of a data acquisition unit connected to a bench top load instrument. For accurate measurements the lab animals have to be sedated and immobilized in the current setup which is also bulky. A telemetry unit equipped with strain gages designed for implantable measurement of bone strain was designed to address this problem. The measurements collected by an implantable telemetry unit are of high interest to orthopedic researchers who wish to know the load acting on an orthopedic implant and hence to help guide the rehabilitation outcomes in a patient. This thesis describes two small telemetry units with multiple configurable sensor channels which can be used to sense resistance and voltage. Thus, the designed units can be used in home energy monitoring applications as well. The units have low power consumption and were designed using off-the-shelf components. Their dimensions are 24 mm x 13 mm and 10 mm x 10 mm. The sensor signals are multiplexed, modulated and transmitted to a remote computer by means of a radio transceiver. Besides measuring strain integrated levels the telemetry units can also measure acceleration in 3 axes. Wireless battery charging is another feature that was included in our design which is a key feature for surgically implanted devices. To show that our telemetry units has comparable accuracy and compactness to the current setup, we present the readings from both setups. A ZigBee wireless sensor network to monitor and control home appliances was designed and successfully tested. A central control unit is the coordinator which sets up the network and configures the ZigBee network parameters. The battery powered sensors are configured as end-devices which periodically report sensor data such as light, temperature, accelerometer and energy consumption values to the coordinator. Any home appliance limited to less than 10 Amps in the ZigBee network can be turned on or off from the central control unit. With bidirectional communication achieved between the central control unit and the end-device, we were able to achieve a home automation system.Introduction -- Background -- Telemetry unit architecture -- Data collection and results -- Conclusion and future work -- Appendix A.1. Four layer PCB layout of the eight channel telemetry unit -- Appendix A.2. Four layer PCB layout of the four channel telemetry uni

Transiently Powered Computers

Demand for compact, easily deployable, energy-efficient computers has driven the development of general-purpose transiently powered computers (TPCs) that lack both batteries and wired power, operating exclusively on energy harvested from their surroundings. TPCs\u27 dependence solely on transient, harvested power offers several important design-time benefits. For example, omitting batteries saves board space and weight while obviating the need to make devices physically accessible for maintenance. However, transient power may provide an unpredictable supply of energy that makes operation difficult. A predictable energy supply is a key abstraction underlying most electronic designs. TPCs discard this abstraction in favor of opportunistic computation that takes advantage of available resources. A crucial question is how should a software-controlled computing device operate if it depends completely on external entities for power and other resources? The question poses challenges for computation, communication, storage, and other aspects of TPC design. The main idea of this work is that software techniques can make energy harvesting a practicable form of power supply for electronic devices. Its overarching goal is to facilitate the design and operation of usable TPCs. This thesis poses a set of challenges that are fundamental to TPCs, then pairs these challenges with approaches that use software techniques to address them. To address the challenge of computing steadily on harvested power, it describes Mementos, an energy-aware state-checkpointing system for TPCs. To address the dependence of opportunistic RF-harvesting TPCs on potentially untrustworthy RFID readers, it describes CCCP, a protocol and system for safely outsourcing data storage to RFID readers that may attempt to tamper with data. Additionally, it describes a simulator that facilitates experimentation with the TPC model, and a prototype computational RFID that implements the TPC model. To show that TPCs can improve existing electronic devices, this thesis describes applications of TPCs to implantable medical devices (IMDs), a challenging design space in which some battery-constrained devices completely lack protection against radio-based attacks. TPCs can provide security and privacy benefits to IMDs by, for instance, cryptographically authenticating other devices that want to communicate with the IMD before allowing the IMD to use any of its battery power. This thesis describes a simplified IMD that lacks its own radio, saving precious battery energy and therefore size. The simplified IMD instead depends on an RFID-scale TPC for all of its communication functions. TPCs are a natural area of exploration for future electronic design, given the parallel trends of energy harvesting and miniaturization. This work aims to establish and evaluate basic principles by which TPCs can operate

Improving the mechanistic study of neuromuscular diseases through the development of a fully wireless and implantable recording device

Neuromuscular diseases manifest by a handful of known phenotypes affecting the peripheral nerves, skeletal muscle fibers, and neuromuscular junction. Common signs of these diseases include demyelination, myasthenia, atrophy, and aberrant muscle activity—all of which may be tracked over time using one or more electrophysiological markers. Mice, which are the predominant mammalian model for most human diseases, have been used to study congenital neuromuscular diseases for decades. However, our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these pathologies is still incomplete. This is in part due to the lack of instrumentation available to easily collect longitudinal, in vivo electrophysiological activity from mice. There remains a need for a fully wireless, batteryless, and implantable recording system that can be adapted for a variety of electrophysiological measurements and also enable long-term, continuous data collection in very small animals. To meet this need a miniature, chronically implantable device has been developed that is capable of wirelessly coupling energy from electromagnetic fields while implanted within a body. This device can both record and trigger bioelectric events and may be chronically implanted in rodents as small as mice. This grants investigators the ability to continuously observe electrophysiological changes corresponding to disease progression in a single, freely behaving, untethered animal. The fully wireless closed-loop system is an adaptable solution for a range of long-term mechanistic and diagnostic studies in rodent disease models. Its high level of functionality, adjustable parameters, accessible building blocks, reprogrammable firmware, and modular electrode interface offer flexibility that is distinctive among fully implantable recording or stimulating devices. The key significance of this work is that it has generated novel instrumentation in the form of a fully implantable bioelectric recording device having a much higher level of functionality than any other fully wireless system available for mouse work. This has incidentally led to contributions in the areas of wireless power transfer and neural interfaces for upper-limb prosthesis control. Herein the solution space for wireless power transfer is examined including a close inspection of far-field power transfer to implanted bioelectric sensors. Methods of design and characterization for the iterative development of the device are detailed. Furthermore, its performance and utility in remote bioelectric sensing applications is demonstrated with humans, rats, healthy mice, and mouse models for degenerative neuromuscular and motoneuron diseases

A system architecture, processor, and communication protocol for secure implants

Secure and energy-efficient communication between Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) and authorized external users is attracting increasing attention these days. However, there currently exists no systematic approach to the problem, while solutions from neighboring fields, such as wireless sensor networks, are not directly transferable due to the peculiarities of the IMD domain. This work describes an original, efficient solution for secure IMD communication. A new implant system architecture is proposed, where security and main-implant functionality are made completely decoupled by running the tasks onto two separate cores. Wireless communication goes through a custom security ASIP, called SISC (Smart-Implant Security Core), which runs an energy-efficient security protocol. The security core is powered by RF-harvested energy until it performs external-reader authentication, providing an elegant defense mechanism agai

Split Ring Resonator Inspired Implantable Platform for Wireless Brain Care

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has seen a noticeable tendency in the implementation with biomedical applications. Implantable RFID microelectronic system has been considered as a promising strategy in continuous neural signal extraction to construct the interface between the human brain and computer. This brain-machine interface is believed to largely improve the patients’ potential to recovery from traumatic brain injury or spinal cord injury. The challenge of this approach is the establishment of a reliable wireless data and power link between the implant device and the off-body unit in the high lossy human tissue environment. Meanwhile, the limitation of the implant size also poses another strict requirement to system miniaturization. In this project, a novel split ring resonator (SRR) inspired antenna system comprising a small implantable split ring resonator carrying a UHF RFID microsystem and a wearable split ring is developed and analyzed. The implantable part is self-matched with the RFID IC without additional matching components in the simulated intra-cranial tissue environment. The wearable part concentrically affixed to the scalp is for directivity and radiation efficiency improvement. The physically separated parts of the system form a remotely detectable platform for the wireless brain care applications. In the wireless experiments, the prototyped antenna system is verified to have a backscattered detectable distance of 1.1 m within the entire UHF band from 840 to 960 MHz when the implantable part is submerged 10 mm deep in the human-tissue-like liquid. The detectable distance is also found to have a reverse relationship with the implant depth. With the 5 mm implant depth, the detectable distance reaches a maxi-mum of 1.5 mm at 950 MHz. In order to investigate the system reliability in practical implementation, the detectable distance of the system with lateral and rotational misalignments between the two parts was also measured. The system working distance re-mains higher than 90 cm under marked, up to 5 mm lateral or 45° rotational misalignments between the implantable and wearable parts

Integrated Circuits and Systems for Smart Sensory Applications

Connected intelligent sensing reshapes our society by empowering people with increasing new ways of mutual interactions. As integration technologies keep their scaling roadmap, the horizon of sensory applications is rapidly widening, thanks to myriad light-weight low-power or, in same cases even self-powered, smart devices with high-connectivity capabilities. CMOS integrated circuits technology is the best candidate to supply the required smartness and to pioneer these emerging sensory systems. As a result, new challenges are arising around the design of these integrated circuits and systems for sensory applications in terms of low-power edge computing, power management strategies, low-range wireless communications, integration with sensing devices. In this Special Issue recent advances in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) and systems for smart sensory applications in the following five emerging topics: (I) dedicated short-range communications transceivers; (II) digital smart sensors, (III) implantable neural interfaces, (IV) Power Management Strategies in wireless sensor nodes and (V) neuromorphic hardware

Study and development of a sensorized platform for the monitoring of LVAD-implanted patients

In the industrialized countries, heart failure is the most frequent cause of death. The ageing of the world population and the low availability of heart donors with respect to the demand have led to the develop and experimentation of device therapy for patients with heart failure, not only as bridge to transplant, but also as destination therapy. Nowadays different mechanical ventricular assist devices (VADs) are in use but, in order to use them as alternative to transplant, an approach could be the development of a implantable platform integrating, on the VAD, miniaturized innovative flow and pressure sensors and implementing a continuous monitoring strategy, with the purpose to optimize and personalize the heart unloading degree. The main components of the implantable platform are: the LVAD, the monitoring flow and pressure sensors embedded on the pump, a transcutaneous energy transfer (TET) system, a telemetry (TEL) system and a central control unit (ARU) for the wireless transfer of data collected by the implanted sensors and the control of the VAD status. This work of thesis is about the integration of the pressure sensors on a in-vitro platform, emulating the implantable platform, the contribution on the ARU development and pc-based graphical user interface and the evaluation of the biocompatibility and efficiency of the TET and TEL systems

Modern Telemetry

Telemetry is based on knowledge of various disciplines like Electronics, Measurement, Control and Communication along with their combination. This fact leads to a need of studying and understanding of these principles before the usage of Telemetry on selected problem solving. Spending time is however many times returned in form of obtained data or knowledge which telemetry system can provide. Usage of telemetry can be found in many areas from military through biomedical to real medical applications. Modern way to create a wireless sensors remotely connected to central system with artificial intelligence provide many new, sometimes unusual ways to get a knowledge about remote objects behaviour. This book is intended to present some new up to date accesses to telemetry problems solving by use of new sensors conceptions, new wireless transfer or communication techniques, data collection or processing techniques as well as several real use case scenarios describing model examples. Most of book chapters deals with many real cases of telemetry issues which can be used as a cookbooks for your own telemetry related problems