Abstract
In ubiquitous health-care monitoring (HCM), wireless body area networks (WBANs) are envisioned as appealing solutions that may offer reliable methods for real-time monitoring of patients’ health conditions by employing the emerging communication technologies. This paper therefore focuses more on the state-of-the-art wireless communication systems that can be explored in the next-generation WBAN solutions for HCM. Also, this study addressed the critical issues confronted by the existing WBANs that are employed in HCM. Examples of such issues include wide-range health data communication constraint, health data delivery reliability concern, and energy efficiency, which are attributed to the limitations of the legacy short range, medium range, and the cellular technologies that are typically employed in WBAN systems. Since the WBAN sensor devices are usually configured with a finite battery power, they often get drained during prolonged operations. This phenomenon is technically exacerbated by the fact that the legacy communication systems, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, and so on, consume more energy during data communications. This unfortunate situation offers a scope for employing suitable communication systems identified in this study to improve the productivity of WBANs in HCM. For this to be achieved, the emerging communication systems such as the low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are investigated in this study based on their power transmission, data transmission rate, data reliability in the context of efficient data delivery, communication coverage, and latency, including their advantages, as well as disadvantages. As a consequence, the LPWAN solutions are presented for WBAN systems in remote HCM. Furthermore, this research work also points out future directions for the realization of the next-generation of WBANs, as well as how to improve the identified communication systems, to further enhance their productivity in WBAN solutions for HCM.
Highlights
In recent times, research efforts have been active in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to improve the health-care domain, and, to that effect, a new technology that is human-body-focused has been proposed
Considering the above discussions, it is apparent that most reviews focused mostly on the legacy short-range communication technologies for wireless body area networks (WBANs), while a few focused on the integration of low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) in health-care monitoring (HCM), such as [16,17], and none has exploited the integration of LPWAN in WBANs for remote HCM in order to satisfy the WBAN communication network quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as energy efficiency, low latency, and health data transmission reliability
Since WBANs health data are critical in nature and require little or no delay in communication, the LPWAN solutions are proposed as promising solutions, and it is apparent that they have the capability of playing important roles in WBAN systems, especially in terms of health delivery reliability, power efficiency, and long-distance communication coverage to remote health centers in a seamless manner
Summary
Research efforts have been active in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to improve the health-care domain, and, to that effect, a new technology that is human-body-focused has been proposed. Regardless of the interesting promises of WBAN solutions, they are faced with a number of issues considered as open research problems that need to be tackled to make WBANs efficient, effective, and reliable for HCM. Such issues include energy consumption, data communication reliability, and wide communication coverage. It is essential to design energy-efficient solutions in WBANs for reliable HCM, as well as sustainable network operations To achieve this complex task, emerging low-power communication technologies are envisaged as an appealing solution that may be explored and employed to achieve energy efficiency in WBANs for HCM, including high health data reliability and a significant reduction in the latency issue.
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