A SOA-based middleware for WBAN

Abstract

Advances in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) will allow a range of medical applications that will significantly improve the quality of health care. Placing a number of tiny wireless sensors, on the human body, create a wireless body area network that can monitor various vital signs, providing feedback to the user and medical personnel, a thing that promise to revolutionize health monitoring. Nevertheless the potential of using a body area network with several sensors to monitor vital functions of a human body can only be tapped if we achieve the ease of use and the ease of configuration. In this paper we propose a service-oriented middleware design for WBAN middleware. In the proposed architecture, sensors are coordinated by a gateway node, which in turn retransmits data to a remote central unit and receives WBAN control information and queries from this central unit. The central unit on the other hand will be in charge of storing sensors data, sensor reconfiguration and resource management client, detecting alarms and sending the patients' information to the medical staff. The target user is a patient who needs regular monitoring. The patient usually resides in a care unit or residence for elder people. WBAN in this case shall increase patient comfort and reduces periodical checkups allowing remote monitoring. We believe that the use of Web Services and standardizing the messages exchanged is a potential solution for interoperability and ease of use and configuration challenges. This will attract a larger pool of application developers, leading to more innovative applications.