A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time and provide real-time updates of the patient's status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solutions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables. In V3, the manuscript is converted to LaTe

New Inflation in Waterfall Region

We introduce a class of new inflation models within the waterfall region of a generalized hybrid inflation framework. The initial conditions are generated in the valley of hybrid preinflation. Both single-field and multi-field inflationary scenarios have been identified within this context. A supersymmetric realization of this scenario can successfully be achieved within the tribrid inflation framework. To assess the model's viability, we calculate the predictions of inflationary observables using the $\delta N$ formalism, demonstrating excellent agreement with the most recent Planck data. Furthermore, this model facilitates successful reheating and nonthermal leptogenesis, with the matter-field component of the inflaton identified as a sneutrino.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure

Comparative Analysis of Microbial Prevalence in Normal and Endometritic cows

The objective of this study was to perform a comparative analysis of microbial prevalence in normal and endometritic cows. To determine the causative microbes of endometritis, cows were divided into four groups, comprising 10 cows each. Group A: normal cows with no signs and symptoms. Group B: Young stock (fit for breeding) cows suffering from endometritis. Group C: milking cows suffering from Endometritis. Group D: dry cows suffering from Endometritis. Three sterile swabs were collected from all cows of four groups, thus making a total of 120 samples. Bacterial isolation and identification was performed according to bergey’s manual. Most common pathogen in the uterus of endometritic cows were Escherichia coli and then Trueperella pyogenes > Salmonella enterica > Klebsiella pneumonia > Bacillus subtilis > Fusobacterium necrophorum > Proteus vulgaris > Staphylococcus aureus > Streptococcus pneumoniae. In normal cows, mostly numbers of isolates were gram positive. S. aureus was found to be most abundant in normal cows followed by S. pneumoniae, B. subtilis, T. pyogenes, E. coli and K. pneumoniae. Higher numbers of bacteria were found in endometritic cows as compared to normal cows. In conclusion, E. coli was found to be abundant pathogens in the diseased cows and S. aureus was mostly found in normal cows. This study provides information about prevalence of endometritis in cows which can be used as base to treat endometritic cows

Pollen fertility estimation of selected taxa of Kaghan valley, Pakistan

Pollen fertility estimation of selected taxa of Kaghan Valley was surveyed. A total 51species belonging to 22 different families i.e., Acanthaceae, Apiaceae, Asteraceae,Berberidaceae, Brassicaceae, Caprifoliacaeae, Caesalpinaceae, Hippocastanaceae, Lythraceae,Malvaceae, Oleaceae, Paplionaceae, Podophylaceae, Polygonaceae, Rosaceae, Ranunculaceae,Salicaceae, Scrophulariaceae, Solanaceae, Urticaceae Valerianaceae and Poaceae wereinvestigated for their pollen fertility. The dominant families regarding number of specieswere Asteraceae having 8 species and then Poaceae and Rosaceae having 6 species. Highestpollen fertility 100% value was observed in Phragmites communis Trin. and Solanum surattense Burm.f., while the lowest 58.49% value was observed in Sorbaria tomentosa (Lindl.) Rech. Most of the species showed a range of pollen fertility as 70-80 %, indicated thatthe flora of Kaghan Valley is well-established and stable

Design of an integrated sub-6 GHz and mmWave MIMO antenna for 5G handheld devices

The authors appreciate financial support from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant Agreement No 801538. As well as, this work was partially supported by the Antenna and Wireless Propagation Group (https://sites.google.com/view/awpgrp/home accessed on 16 June 2021) and from the Researchers Supporting Project number (RSP-2021/58), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Highly Compact GCPW-Fed Multi-Branch Structure Multi-Band Antenna for Wireless Applications

In this work, we present a highly compact multi-branch structure multi-band antenna with a grounded coplanar waveguide (GCPW)-fed structure printed on 26 ×13 ×1.6 mm3 sized FR-4 substrate having dielectric constant r of 4.3 and loss tangent of 0.02. In the proposed antenna, ve branches are extended from the main radiator to provide multi-band behavior. Two branches are introduced at the upper end of the main radiator, e ectively covering the lower bands, while the other three branches are introduced near the center of the main radiator to extend operation to higher bands. e designed antenna covers ve di erent bands: 2.4 GHz, 4.5 GHz, 5.5 GHz, 6.5 GHz, and 7.8 GHz, with respective gain values of 1.34, 1.60, 1.83, 1.80, and 3.50 dBi and respective radiation e ciency values of 90, 88, 84, 75, and 89%. e antenna shows a good impedance bandwidth, ranging from 170MHz to 3070 MHz. e proposed antenna is simulated in CST Microwave Studio, while its performance is experimentally validated by the fabrication and testing process. e antenna has potential applications for IoT, sub-6 GHz 5G and WLAN (both enablers for IoT), C-band, and X-band services.Dr. Mohammad Alibakhshikenari acknowledges support from the CONEX-Plus programme funded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801538

A Very Low Power MAC (VLPM) Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of a limited number of battery operated nodes that are used to monitor the vital signs of a patient over long periods of time without restricting the patient’s movements. They are an easy and fast way to diagnose the patient’s status and to consult the doctor. Device as well as network lifetime are among the most important factors in a WBAN. Prolonging the lifetime of the WBAN strongly depends on controlling the energy consumption of sensor nodes. To achieve energy efficiency, low duty cycle MAC protocols are used, but for medical applications, especially in the case of pacemakers where data have time-limited relevance, these protocols increase latency which is highly undesirable and leads to system instability. In this paper, we propose a low power MAC protocol (VLPM) based on existing wakeup radio approaches which reduce energy consumption as well as improving the response time of a node. We categorize the traffic into uplink and downlink traffic. The nodes are equipped with both a low power wake-up transmitter and receiver. The low power wake-up receiver monitors the activity on channel all the time with a very low power and keeps the MCU (Micro Controller Unit) along with main radio in sleep mode. When a node [BN or BNC (BAN Coordinator)] wants to communicate with another node, it uses the low-power radio to send a wakeup packet, which will prompt the receiver to power up its primary radio to listen for the message that follows shortly. The wake-up packet contains the desired node’s ID along with some other information to let the targeted node to wake-up and take part in communication and let all other nodes to go to sleep mode quickly. The VLPM protocol is proposed for applications having low traffic conditions. For high traffic rates, optimization is needed. Analytical results show that the proposed protocol outperforms both synchronized and unsynchronized MAC protocols like T-MAC, SCP-MAC, B-MAC and X-MAC in terms of energy consumption and response time