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

Detailed examination of a packet collision model for Bluetooth Low Energy advertising mode

The aim of this paper is to investigate the amount of energy that is required to successfully transmit information inside the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertising packets. There are applications that require more than one BLE node to simultaneously transmit data. The BLE protocol utilizes a specific communication method termed advertising mode to perform unidirectional broadcasts of data from the advertising devices. However, with an increased number of BLE devices advertising simultaneously, there will be inevitable packet collisions from the advertising devices. This results in a waste of energy, specifically in low-power applications where lower consumption is desirable to minimize the need for battery replacements. This paper examines a packet collision model for the BLE advertising mode with the results validated using experimental data. Our analysis shows that when the throughput of the BLE network starts to fall due to an increase in the number of packet collisions, the energy consumption of the BLE nodes increase exponentially with respect to the number of nodes

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 Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

Wellness Protocol: An Integrated Framework for Ambient Assisted Living : A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In Electronics, Information and Communication Systems At School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Manawatu Campus, New Zealand

Listed in 2016 Dean's List of Exceptional ThesesSmart and intelligent homes of today and tomorrow are committed to enhancing the security, safety and comfort of the occupants. In the present scenario, most of the smart homes Protocols are limited to controlled activities environments for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) of the elderly and the convalescents. The aim of this research is to develop a Wellness Protocol that forecasts the wellness of any individual living in the AAL environment. This is based on wireless sensors and networks that are applied to data mining and machine learning to monitor the activities of daily living. The heterogeneous sensor and actuator nodes, based on WSNs are deployed into the home environment. These nodes generate the real-time data related to the object usage and other movements inside the home, to forecast the wellness of an individual. The new Protocol has been designed and developed to be suitable especially for the smart home system. The Protocol is reliable, efficient, flexible, and economical for wireless sensor networks based AAL. According to consumer demand, the Wellness Protocol based smart home systems can be easily installed with existing households without any significant changes and with a user-friendly interface. Additionally, the Wellness Protocol has extended to designing a smart building environment for an apartment. In the endeavour of smart home design and implementation, the Wellness Protocol deals with large data handling and interference mitigation. A Wellness based smart home monitoring system is the application of automation with integral systems of accommodation facilities to boost and progress the everyday life of an occupant

A Novel Framework for Software Defined Wireless Body Area Network

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has gained huge popularity in replacing traditional network by offering flexible and dynamic network management. It has drawn significant attention of the researchers from both academia and industries. Particularly, incorporating SDN in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications indicates promising benefits in terms of dealing with challenges like traffic management, authentication, energy efficiency etc. while enhancing administrative control. This paper presents a novel framework for Software Defined WBAN (SDWBAN), which brings the concept of SDN technology into WBAN applications. By decoupling the control plane from data plane and having more programmatic control would assist to overcome the current lacking and challenges of WBAN. Therefore, we provide a conceptual framework for SDWBAN with packet flow model and a future direction of research pertaining to SDWBAN.Comment: Presented on 8th International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulatio

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