Abstract
Nowadays society is demanding more and more smart healthcare services that allow monitoring patient status in a non-invasive way, anywhere and anytime. Thus, healthcare applications are currently facing important challenges guided by the u-health (ubiquitous health) and p-health (pervasive health) paradigms. New emerging technologies can be combined with other widely deployed ones to develop such next-generation healthcare systems. The main objective of this paper is to review and provide more details on the work presented in “LOBIN: E-Textile and Wireless-Sensor-Network-Based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments”, published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, as well as to extend and update the comparison with other similar systems. As a result, the paper discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of using different architectures and communications technologies to develop wearable systems for pervasive healthcare applications.
Highlights
IntroductionThe demand for smart healthcare services, which allow monitoring patients’ health status in a pervasive and noninvasive manner, is increasing as a means to alleviate the issues associated with costly welfare systems and an increasing elderly population, as well as to improve quality of life, bringing benefits to patients, medical personnel, and society [1,2].As a result, outstanding research and development efforts have been carried out during the last years both by academia and industry in this area, driving great breakthroughs on enabler technologies, such as wireless communications, micro- and even nano-electronics, or sensing techniques and materials.Advances in microelectronics and wireless communications have made Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Body Area Networks (BANs), which represent two key functional components in smart healthcare systems, a reality, despite the fact they present different features.WSNs can be used to deploy low-cost and low-consumption communications infrastructure to support wide coverage and mobility (i.e., pervasiveness), enabling natural movement of patients as well as potential development of value- added services (e.g., Location Based Services—LBS).BANs are composed of tiny smart sensors deployed in, on, or around a human body [3]
Such sensors are deployed inside the human body in the so-called In-Vivo or Implantable Body Area Networks (BANs) (IBANs)
Despite every system implements its own solution in this sense, they all have in common the presence of at least a BAN segment
Summary
The demand for smart healthcare services, which allow monitoring patients’ health status in a pervasive and noninvasive manner, is increasing as a means to alleviate the issues associated with costly welfare systems and an increasing elderly population, as well as to improve quality of life, bringing benefits to patients, medical personnel, and society [1,2].As a result, outstanding research and development efforts have been carried out during the last years both by academia and industry in this area, driving great breakthroughs on enabler technologies, such as wireless communications, micro- and even nano-electronics, or sensing techniques and materials.Advances in microelectronics and wireless communications have made Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Body Area Networks (BANs), which represent two key functional components in smart healthcare systems, a reality, despite the fact they present different features.WSNs can be used to deploy low-cost and low-consumption communications infrastructure to support wide coverage and mobility (i.e., pervasiveness), enabling natural movement of patients as well as potential development of value- added services (e.g., Location Based Services—LBS).BANs are composed of tiny smart sensors deployed in, on, or around a human body [3]. The demand for smart healthcare services, which allow monitoring patients’ health status in a pervasive and noninvasive manner, is increasing as a means to alleviate the issues associated with costly welfare systems and an increasing elderly population, as well as to improve quality of life, bringing benefits to patients, medical personnel, and society [1,2]. Advances in microelectronics and wireless communications have made Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Body Area Networks (BANs), which represent two key functional components in smart healthcare systems, a reality, despite the fact they present different features. WSNs can be used to deploy low-cost and low-consumption communications infrastructure to support wide coverage and mobility (i.e., pervasiveness), enabling natural movement of patients as well as potential development of value- added services (e.g., Location Based Services—LBS). BANs are composed of tiny smart sensors deployed in, on, or around a human body [3]. Such sensors are deployed inside the human body in the so-called In-Vivo or Implantable BANs (IBANs)
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