7,085 research outputs found
Mobihealth: mobile health services based on body area networks
In this chapter we describe the concept of MobiHealth and the approach developed during the MobiHealth project (MobiHealth, 2002). The concept was to bring together the technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs), wireless broadband communications and wearable medical devices to provide mobile healthcare services for patients and health professionals. These technologies enable remote patient care services such as management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies. Because the patient is free to move anywhere whilst wearing the MobiHealth BAN, patient mobility is maximised. The vision is that patients can enjoy enhanced freedom and quality of life through avoidance or reduction of hospital stays. For the health services it means that pressure on overstretched hospital services can be alleviated
The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience
Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and
transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as
the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the
availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow
efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public
information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post
emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment
of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via
wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables
such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the
Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to
communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any
infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper,
we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits
in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their
spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal
communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the
conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the
main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in
practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including
physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data
traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of todayâs industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
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