A comprehensive survey of wireless body area networks on PHY, MAC, and network layers solutions

Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted

A Periodic Transmission Line Model for Body Channel Communication

Body channel communication (BCC) is a technique for data transmission exploiting the human body as communication channel. Even though it was pioneered about 25 years ago, the identification of a good electrical model behind its functioning is still an open research question. The proposed distributed model can then serve as a supporting tool for the design, allowing to enhance the performances of any BCC system. A novel finite periodic transmission line model was developed to describe the human body as transmission medium. According to this model, for the first time, the parasitic capacitance between the transmitter and the receiver is assumed to depend on their distance. The parameters related to the body and electrodes are acquired experimentally by fitting the bio-impedentiometric measurements, in the range of frequencies from 1 kHz to 1 MHz, obtaining a mean absolute error lower than 4° and 30Ω for the phase angle and impedance modulus, respectively. The proposed mathematical framework has been successfully validated by describing a ground-referred and low-complexity system called Live Wire, suitable as supporting tool for visually impaired people, and finding good agreement between the measured and the calculated data, marking a ±3% error for communication distances ranging from 20 to 150 cm. In this work we introduced a new circuital approach, for capacitive-coupling systems, based on finite periodic transmission line, capable to describe and model BCC systems allowing to optimize the performances of similar systems

A Periodic Transmission Line Model for Body Channel Communication

Body channel communication (BCC) is a technique for data transmission exploiting the human body as communication channel. Even though it was pioneered about 25 years ago, the identification of a good electrical model behind its functioning is still an open research question. The proposed distributed model can then serve as a supporting tool for the design, allowing to enhance the performances of any BCC system. A novel finite periodic transmission line model was developed to describe the human body as transmission medium. According to this model, for the first time, the parasitic capacitance between the transmitter and the receiver is assumed to depend on their distance. The parameters related to the body and electrodes are acquired experimentally by fitting the bio-impedentiometric measurements, in the range of frequencies from 1 kHz to 1 MHz, obtaining a mean absolute error lower than 4° and 30 $Omega$ for the phase angle and impedance modulus, respectively. The proposed mathematical framework has been successfully validated by describing a ground-referred and low-complexity system called Live Wire, suitable as supporting tool for visually impaired people, and finding good agreement between the measured and the calculated data, marking a ±3% error for communication distances ranging from 20 to 150 cm. In this work we introduced a new circuital approach, for capacitive-coupling systems, based on finite periodic transmission line, capable to describe and model BCC systems allowing to optimize the performances of similar systems

Secure Intra-Body Wireless Communications (SIWiC) System Project

SIWiC System is a project to investigate, design and implement future wireless networks of implantable sensors in the body. This futuristic project is designed to make use of the emerging and yet-to-emerge technologies, including ultra-wide band (UWB) for wireless communications, smart implantable sensors, ultra low power networking protocols, security and privacy for bandwidth and power deficient devices and quantum computing. Progress in each of these fronts is hindered by the needs of breakthrough. But, as we will see in this paper, these major challenges are being met or will be met in near future. SIWiC system is a network of in-situ wireless devices that are implanted to coordinate sensed data inside the body, such as symptoms monitoring collected internally, or biometric data collected of an outside object from within the intra-body network. One node has the capability of communicating outside the body to send data or alarm to a relevant authority, e.g., a remote physician

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

Live Wire - A Low-Complexity Body Channel Communication System for Landmark Identification

This paper presents a robust simplex Body Channel Communication (BCC) system aimed at providing an interactive infrastructure solution for visually impaired people. Compared to existing BCC solutions, it provides high versatility, weara- bility and installability in an environment in a low complexity hardware-software solution. It operates with a ground referred transmitter (TX) and it is based on an asynchronous thresh- old receiver (RX) architecture. Synchronization, demodulation and packetizing and threshold control are completely software defined and implemented using MicroPython. The RX includes Bluetooth® (BT) radio connectivity and a cell-phone application provides push text-to-speech notifications to a smartphone. The hardware achieves a Packet Error Rate (PER) of ∼0.1 at 550 kHz pulse center frequency, Synchronized-On Off Keying (S- OOK) modulation and 1 kbps data rate, for an average current consumption of 44mA

IMDfence: Architecting a Secure Protocol for Implantable Medical Devices

Over the past decade, focus on the security and privacy aspects of implantable medical devices (IMDs) has intensified, driven by the multitude of cybersecurity vulnerabilities found in various existing devices. However, due to their strict computational, energy and physical constraints, conventional security protocols are not directly applicable to IMDs. Custom-tailored schemes have been proposed instead which, however, fail to cover the full spectrum of security features that modern IMDs and their ecosystems so critically require. In this paper we propose IMDfence, a security protocol for IMD ecosystems that provides a comprehensive yet practical security portfolio, which includes availability, non-repudiation, access control, entity authentication, remote monitoring and system scalability. The protocol also allows emergency access that results in the graceful degradation of offered services without compromising security and patient safety. The performance of the security protocol as well as its feasibility and impact on modern IMDs are extensively analyzed and evaluated. We find that IMDfence achieves the above security requirements at a mere less than 7% increase in total IMD energy consumption, and less than 14 ms and 9 kB increase in system delay and memory footprint, respectively

Recent Application in Biometrics

In the recent years, a number of recognition and authentication systems based on biometric measurements have been proposed. Algorithms and sensors have been developed to acquire and process many different biometric traits. Moreover, the biometric technology is being used in novel ways, with potential commercial and practical implications to our daily activities. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in biometrics. The topics covered in this book reflect well both aspects of development. They include biometric sample quality, privacy preserving and cancellable biometrics, contactless biometrics, novel and unconventional biometrics, and the technical challenges in implementing the technology in portable devices. The book consists of 15 chapters. It is divided into four sections, namely, biometric applications on mobile platforms, cancelable biometrics, biometric encryption, and other applications. The book was reviewed by editors Dr. Jucheng Yang and Dr. Norman Poh. We deeply appreciate the efforts of our guest editors: Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park and Dr. Sook Yoon, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers