Body Area Network for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Theory and Implementation

Abstract

With recent advances in wireless communication, lowpower miniaturized sensors and semiconductor technologies, the sensor networks have become the integral part of ubiquitous healthcare systems. These networks can be used to provide remote health monitoring for a long period of time with real-time feedback to the hospital. For example, a set of intelligent and low-power sensors can be seamlessly integrated in/on a human body to create an autonomous sensor network called Body Area Network (BAN). The BAN can be used to stream biological information from the human body and transmit it over a long distance to a remote server for diagnostic recommendations. Some applications include diagnoses and treatment of many diseases including myocardial infarction, gastrointestinal tract, cancer detection, asthma, diabetes, and other health problems. Compared to traditional sensor networks, BANs face additional research challenges including signal propagation in/around a human body, power scavenging issues, fault tolerance, mobility, reliable Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, Quality of Service (QoS), biocompatibility and security. This special issue invited high quality unpublished research papers and review articles to disseminate the state-of-the-art research and development on BANs for ubiquitous healthcare systems, and to highlight open issues and challenges. Out of many good papers, eight papers were finally accepted for publication in this special issue. The summary of these papers is given below Jovanov et al. reviews the opportunities and challenges of BAN for ubiquitous healthcare applications. This paper provides a fundamental overview of BAN both for beginners and experts. Li et al. presents the current status of IEEE 802.15.6 standardization where three PHYs and a single common MAC are discussed. In addition, the authors implements a prototype BAN system based on the high band of Ultrawide Band (UWB). Li et al. proposes a novel MAC protocol for BAN called LDTAMAC, where the Guaranteed Time Slots (GTSs) are dynamically allocated according to the traffic load. To reduce the average packet delay the data packets are transmitted in the current superframe. In addition, the active portion of the superframe is adjusted in order to minimize the energy consumption. It is shown that the proposed protocol outperforms IEEE 802.15.4 in terms of packet delay and energy consumption. Cheng et al. proposes another MAC protocol called RACOON. This protocol satisfies the inter-BAN QoS requirements and overcomes the performance degradation caused by mobility. Simulation results verify that RACOON has better QoS performance in terms of transmission latency, energy consumption, and user capacity compared with other QoS protocols. Selimis et al. proposes a lightweight security scheme for BAN. This paper estimates the additional energy consumption introduced by several security schemes based on commercially available off-the-shelf hardware components (microprocessor and radio), the network topology and the MAC frame. Furthermore, the authors propose a new microcontroller design in order to reduce the energy consumption of the system. The new microcontroller needs fewer clock cycles and memory accesses to deliver the output. This microcontroller is optimized for the symmetric algorithm. Chang et al. introduces a portable terrain adaptable fall detection system by placing accelerometers and gyroscopes S. Ullah (*) :K. S. Kwak UWB-ITRC Center, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea e-mail: sanajcs@hotmail.com