Wireless body sensor networks for health-monitoring applications

This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article accepted for publication in Physiological Measurement. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/29/11/R01

Design of an efficient binary phase-shift keying based IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver architecture and its performance analysis

The IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer (PHY) standard is one of the communication standards with wireless features by providing low-power and low-data rates in wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications. In this paper, an efficient IEEE 802.15.4 digital transceiver hardware architecture is designed using the binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) technique. The transceiver mainly has transmitter and receiver modules along with the error calculation unit. The BPSK modulation and demodulation are designed using a digital frequency synthesizer (DFS). The DFS is used to generate the in-phase (I) and quadrature-phase (Q) signals and also provides better system performance than the conventional voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) and look up table (LUT) based memory methods. The differential encoding-decoding mechanism is incorporated to recover the bits effectively and to reduce the hardware complexity. The simulation results are illustrated and used to find the error bits. The design utilizes less chip area, works at 268.2 MHz, and consumes 108 mW of total power. The IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver provides a latency of 3.5 clock cycles and works with a throughput of 76.62 Mbps. The bit error rate (BER) of 2×10-5 is achieved by the proposed digital transceiver and is suitable for real-time applications. The work is compared with existing similar approaches with better improvement in performance parameters

Review of wireless sensors networks in health applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are becoming increasingly important for telemedicine applications, monitoring patients both in the clinical setting and at home. They reduce user discomfort, enhance mobility and reduce costs. WSN are also fundamental in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) since these smart systems, which are tailored to users needs, collect information about users and their ambient in order to provide personalized feedback. Despite the growing use of wireless communications in the health domain and in AAL systems there is a lack of research literature reviewing trials of these technologies. This paper provides a systematic review of the use of WSN in the health domain, presenting current WSN implementations. It covers 126 papers, of which 26 are studies, classified according to inclusion criteria. There is presented a discussion about the recent research conducted in the field.Junta de Andalucía p08-TIC-363

Low-Power Wearable ECG Monitoring System for Multiple-Patient Remote Monitoring

Many devices and solutions for remote electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring have been proposed in the literature. These solutions typically have a large marginal cost per added sensor and are not seamlessly integrated with other smart home solutions. Here, we propose an ECG remote monitoring system that is dedicated to non-technical users in need of long-term health monitoring in residential environments and is integrated in a broader Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure. Our prototype consists of a complete vertical solution with a series of advantages with respect to the state of the art, considering both the prototypes with integrated front end and prototypes realized with off-the-shelf components: 1) ECG prototype sensors with record-low energy per effective number of quantized levels; 2) an architecture providing low marginal cost per added sensor/user; and 3) the possibility of seamless integration with other smart home systems through a single IoT infrastructure

Embedded computing systems design: architectural and application perspectives

Questo elaborato affronta varie problematiche legate alla progettazione e all'implementazione dei moderni sistemi embedded di computing, ponendo in rilevo, e talvolta in contrapposizione, le sfide che emergono all'avanzare della tecnologia ed i requisiti che invece emergono a livello applicativo, derivanti dalle necessità degli utenti finali e dai trend di mercato. La discussione sarà articolata tenendo conto di due punti di vista: la progettazione hardware e la loro applicazione a livello di sistema. A livello hardware saranno affrontati nel dettaglio i problemi di interconnettività on-chip. Aspetto che riguarda la parallelizzazione del calcolo, ma anche l'integrazione di funzionalità eterogenee. Sarà quindi discussa un'architettura d'interconnessione denominata Network-on-Chip (NoC). La soluzione proposta è in grado di supportare funzionalità avanzate di networking direttamente in hardware, consentendo tuttavia di raggiungere sempre un compromesso ottimale tra prestazioni in termini di traffico e requisiti di implementazioni a seconda dell'applicazione specifica. Nella discussione di questa tematica, verrà posto l'accento sul problema della configurabilità dei blocchi che compongono una NoC. Quello della configurabilità, è un problema sempre più sentito nella progettazione dei sistemi complessi, nei quali si cerca di sviluppare delle funzionalità, anche molto evolute, ma che siano semplicemente riutilizzabili. A tale scopo sarà introdotta una nuova metodologia, denominata Metacoding che consiste nell'astrarre i problemi di configurabilità attraverso linguaggi di programmazione di alto livello. Sulla base del metacoding verrà anche proposto un flusso di design automatico in grado di semplificare la progettazione e la configurazione di una NoC da parte del designer di rete. Come anticipato, la discussione si sposterà poi a livello di sistema, per affrontare la progettazione di tali sistemi dal punto di vista applicativo, focalizzando l'attenzione in particolare sulle applicazioni di monitoraggio remoto. A tal riguardo saranno studiati nel dettaglio tutti gli aspetti che riguardano la progettazione di un sistema per il monitoraggio di pazienti affetti da scompenso cardiaco cronico. Si partirà dalla definizione dei requisiti, che, come spesso accade a questo livello, derivano principalmente dai bisogni dell'utente finale, nel nostro caso medici e pazienti. Verranno discusse le problematiche di acquisizione, elaborazione e gestione delle misure. Il sistema proposto introduce vari aspetti innovativi tra i quali il concetto di protocollo operativo e l'elevata interoperabilità offerta. In ultima analisi, verranno riportati i risultati relativi alla sperimentazione del sistema implementato. Infine, il tema del monitoraggio remoto sarà concluso con lo studio delle reti di distribuzione elettrica intelligenti: le Smart Grid, cercando di fare uno studio dello stato dell'arte del settore, proponendo un'architettura di Home Area Network (HAN) e suggerendone una possibile implementazione attraverso Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS)

Towards end-to-end security in internet of things based healthcare

Healthcare IoT systems are distinguished in that they are designed to serve human beings, which primarily raises the requirements of security, privacy, and reliability. Such systems have to provide real-time notifications and responses concerning the status of patients. Physicians, patients, and other caregivers demand a reliable system in which the results are accurate and timely, and the service is reliable and secure. To guarantee these requirements, the smart components in the system require a secure and efficient end-to-end communication method between the end-points (e.g., patients, caregivers, and medical sensors) of a healthcare IoT system. The main challenge faced by the existing security solutions is a lack of secure end-to-end communication. This thesis addresses this challenge by presenting a novel end-to-end security solution enabling end-points to securely and efficiently communicate with each other. The proposed solution meets the security requirements of a wide range of healthcare IoT systems while minimizing the overall hardware overhead of end-to-end communication. End-to-end communication is enabled by the holistic integration of the following contributions. The first contribution is the implementation of two architectures for remote monitoring of bio-signals. The first architecture is based on a low power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol known as ZigBee. It consists of a set of sensor nodes to read data from various medical sensors, process the data, and send them wirelessly over ZigBee to a server node. The second architecture implements on an IP-based wireless sensor network, using IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The system consists of a IEEE 802.11 based sensor module to access bio-signals from patients and send them over to a remote server. In both architectures, the server node collects the health data from several client nodes and updates a remote database. The remote webserver accesses the database and updates the webpage in real-time, which can be accessed remotely. The second contribution is a novel secure mutual authentication scheme for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) implant systems. The proposed scheme relies on the elliptic curve cryptography and the D-Quark lightweight hash design. The scheme consists of three main phases: (1) reader authentication and verification, (2) tag identification, and (3) tag verification. We show that among the existing public-key crypto-systems, elliptic curve is the optimal choice due to its small key size as well as its efficiency in computations. The D-Quark lightweight hash design has been tailored for resource-constrained devices. The third contribution is proposing a low-latency and secure cryptographic keys generation approach based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) features. This is performed by taking advantage of the uniqueness and randomness properties of ECG's main features comprising of PR, RR, PP, QT, and ST intervals. This approach achieves low latency due to its reliance on reference-free ECG's main features that can be acquired in a short time. The approach is called Several ECG Features (SEF)-based cryptographic key generation. The fourth contribution is devising a novel secure and efficient end-to-end security scheme for mobility enabled healthcare IoT. The proposed scheme consists of: (1) a secure and efficient end-user authentication and authorization architecture based on the certificate based Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) handshake protocol, (2) a secure end-to-end communication method based on DTLS session resumption, and (3) support for robust mobility based on interconnected smart gateways in the fog layer. Finally, the fifth and the last contribution is the analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions in healthcare IoT systems including our end-to-end security solution. In this regard, we first identify and present the essential requirements of robust security solutions for healthcare IoT systems. We then analyze the performance of the state-of-the-art end-to-end security solutions (including our scheme) by developing a prototype healthcare IoT system

EMBEDDED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE DESIGN FOR LOW-POWER WIRELESS ECG DEVICE

Master'sMASTER OF ENGINEERIN

A survey on wireless body area networks for eHealthcare systems in residential environments

The progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to the base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments

Design and Implementation of Wireless Point-Of-Care Health Monitoring Systems: Diagnosis For Sleep Disorders and Cardiovascular Diseases

Chronic sleep disorders are present in 40 million people in the United States. More than 25 million people remain undiagnosed and untreated, which accounts for over $22 billion in unnecessary healthcare costs. In addition, another major chronic disease is the heart diseases which cause 23.8% of the deaths in the United States. Thus, there is a need for a low cost, reliable, and ubiquitous patient monitoring system. A remote point-of-care system can satisfy this need by providing real time monitoring of the patient\u27s health condition at remote places. However, the currently available POC systems have some drawbacks; the fixed number of physiological channels and lack of real time monitoring. In this dissertation, several remote POC systems are reported to diagnose sleep disorders and cardiovascular diseases to overcome the drawbacks of the current systems. First, two types of remote POC systems were developed for sleep disorders. One was designed with ZigBee and Wi-Fi network, which provides increase/decrease the number of physiological channels flexibly by using ZigBee star network. It also supports the remote real-time monitoring by extending WPAN to WLAN with combination of two wireless communication topologies, ZigBee and Wi-Fi. The other system was designed with GSM/WCDMA network, which removes the restriction of testing places and provides remote real-time monitoring in the true sense of the word. Second, a fully wearable textile integrated real-time ECG acquisition system for football players was developed to prevent sudden cardiac death. To reduce power consumption, adaptive RF output power control was implemented based on RSSI and the power consumption was reduced up to 20%. Third, as an application of measuring physiological signals, a wireless brain machine interface by using the extracted features of EOG and EEG was implemented to control the movement of a robot. The acceleration/deceleration of the robot is controlled based on the attention level from EEG. The left/right motion of eyeballs of EOG is used to control the direction of the robot. The accuracy rate was about 95%. These kinds of health monitoring systems can reduce the exponentially increasing healthcare costs and cater the most important healthcare needs of the society