THE-FAME: THreshold based Energy-efficient FAtigue MEasurment for Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks using Multiple Sinks

Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) is a technology employed mainly for patient health monitoring. New research is being done to take the technology to the next level i.e. player's fatigue monitoring in sports. Muscle fatigue is the main cause of player's performance degradation. This type of fatigue can be measured by sensing the accumulation of lactic acid in muscles. Excess of lactic acid makes muscles feel lethargic. Keeping this in mind we propose a protocol \underline{TH}reshold based \underline{E}nergy-efficient \underline{FA}tigue \underline{ME}asurement (THE-FAME) for soccer players using WBASN. In THE-FAME protocol, a composite parameter has been used that consists of a threshold parameter for lactic acid accumulation and a parameter for measuring distance covered by a particular player. When any parameters's value in this composite parameter shows an increase beyond threshold, the players is declared to be in a fatigue state. The size of battery and sensor should be very small for the sake of players' best performance. These sensor nodes, implanted inside player's body, are made energy efficient by using multiple sinks instead of a single sink. Matlab simulation results show the effectiveness of THE-FAME.Comment: IEEE 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc

Low-Power Wireless for the Internet of Things: Standards and Applications: Internet of Things, IEEE 802.15.4, Bluetooth, Physical layer, Medium Access Control,coexistence, mesh networking, cyber-physical systems, WSN, M2M

International audienceThe proliferation of embedded systems, wireless technologies, and Internet protocols have enabled the Internet of Things (IoT) to bridge the gap between the virtual and physical world through enabling the monitoring and actuation of the physical world controlled by data processing systems. Wireless technologies, despite their offered convenience, flexibility, low cost, and mobility pose unique challenges such as fading, interference, energy, and security, which must be carefully addressed when using resource-constrained IoT devices. To this end, the efforts of the research community have led to the standardization of several wireless technologies for various types of application domains depending on factors such as reliability, latency, scalability, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we first overview these standard wireless technologies, and we specifically study the MAC and physical layer technologies proposed to address the requirements and challenges of wireless communications. Furthermore, we explain the use of these standards in various application domains, such as smart homes, smart healthcare, industrial automation, and smart cities, and discuss their suitability in satisfying the requirements of these applications. In addition to proposing guidelines to weigh the pros and cons of each standard for an application at hand, we also examine what new strategies can be exploited to overcome existing challenges and support emerging IoT applications

Flexible quality of service model for wireless body area sensor networks

Wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) are becoming an increasingly significant breakthrough technology for smart healthcare systems, enabling improved clinical decision-making in daily medical care. Recently, radio frequency (RF) ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has developed substantially for physiological signal monitoring due to its advantages such as low power consumption, high transmission data rate, and miniature antenna size. Applications of future ubiquitous healthcare systems offer the prospect of collecting human vital signs, early detection of abnormal medical conditions, real-time healthcare data transmission and remote telemedicine support. However, due to the technical constraints of sensor batteries, the supply of power is a major bottleneck for healthcare system design. Moreover, medium access control (MAC) needs to support reliable transmission links that allow sensors to transmit data safely and stably. In this letter, we provide a flexible quality of service (QoS) model for ad-hoc networks that can support fast data transmission, adaptive schedule MAC control, and energy efficient ubiquitous WBASN networks. Results show that the proposed multi-hop communication ad-hoc network model can balance information packet collisions and power consumption. Additionally, wireless communications link in WBASNs can effectively overcome multi-user interference and offer high transmission data rates for healthcare systems

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

IEEE 802.15.4e: a Survey

Several studies have highlighted that the IEEE 802.15.4 standard presents a number of limitations such as low reliability, unbounded packet delays and no protection against interference/fading, that prevent its adoption in applications with stringent requirements in terms of reliability and latency. Recently, the IEEE has released the 802.15.4e amendment that introduces a number of enhancements/modifications to the MAC layer of the original standard in order to overcome such limitations. In this paper we provide a clear and structured overview of all the new 802.15.4e mechanisms. After a general introduction to the 802.15.4e standard, we describe the details of the main 802.15.4e MAC behavior modes, namely Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME), and Low Latency Deterministic Network (LLDN). For each of them, we provide a detailed description and highlight the main features and possible application domains. Also, we survey the current literature and summarize open research issues

Performance Evaluation of Wearable Sensor Systems: A Case Study in Moderate-Scale Deployment in Hospital Environment

A wearable sensor system enables continuous and remote health monitoring and is widely considered as the next generation of healthcare technology. The performance, the packet error rate (PER) in particular, of a wearable sensor system may deteriorate due to a number of factors, particularly the interference from the other wearable sensor systems in the vicinity. We systematically evaluate the performance of the wearable sensor system in terms of PER in the presence of such interference in this paper. The factors that affect the performance of the wearable sensor system, such as density, traffic load, and transmission power in a realistic moderate-scale deployment case in hospital are all considered. Simulation results show that with 20% duty cycle, only 68.5% of data transmission can achieve the targeted reliability requirement (PER is less than 0.05) even in the off-peak period in hospital. We then suggest some interference mitigation schemes based on the performance evaluation results in the case study

Wireless sensor network for health monitoring

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is becoming a significant enabling technology for a wide variety of applications. Recent advances in WSN have facilitated the realization of pervasive health monitoring for both homecare and hospital environments. Current technological advances in sensors, power-efficient integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the development of miniature, lightweight, low-cost, and smart physiological sensor nodes. These nodes are capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs. Furthermore, they can be used in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) or wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) for health monitoring. Many studies were performed and/or are under way in order to develop flexible, reliable, secure, real-time, and power-efficient WBSNs suitable for healthcare applications. To efficiently control and monitor a patient’s status as well as to reduce the cost of power and maintenance, IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, a communication standard for low-power wireless communication, is developed as a new efficient technology in health monitoring systems. The main contribution of this dissertation is to provide a modeling, analysis, and design framework for WSN health monitoring systems. This dissertation describes the applications of wireless sensor networks in the healthcare area and discusses the related issues and challenges. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the acceptance of the current wireless standard for enabling WSNs for healthcare monitoring in real environment. Its focus is on IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocols combined with hardware and software platforms. Especially, it focuses on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance mechanism (CSMA/CA) algorithms for reliable communication in multiple accessing networks. The performance analysis metrics are established through measured data and mathematical analysis. This dissertation evaluates the network performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 unslotted CSMA/CA mechanism for different parameter settings through analytical modeling and simulation. For this protocol, a Markov chain model is used to derive the analytical expression of normalized packet transmission, reliability, channel access delay, and energy consumption. This model is used to describe the stochastic behavior of random access and deterministic behavior of IEEE 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. By using it, the different aspects of health monitoring can be analyzed. The sound transmission of heart beat with other smaller data packet transmission is studied. The obtained theoretical analysis and simulation results can be used to estimate and design the high performance health monitoring systems