Abstract
This survey aims to encourage the multidisciplinary communities to join forces for innovation in the mobile health monitoring area. Specifically, multidisciplinary innovations in medical emergency scenarios can have a significant impact on the effectiveness and quality of the procedures and practices in the delivery of medical care. Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) are a promising technology capable of improving the existing practices in condition assessment and care delivery for a patient in a medical emergency. This technology can also facilitate the early interventions of a specialist physician during the pre-hospital period. WBSNs make possible these early interventions by establishing remote communication links with video/audio support and by providing medical information such as vital signs, electrocardiograms, etc. in real time. This survey focuses on relevant issues needed to understand how to setup a WBSN for medical emergencies. These issues are: monitoring vital signs and video transmission, energy efficient protocols, scheduling, optimization and energy consumption on a WBSN.
Highlights
Life expectancy around the world has increased in the last years [1], which is good news, but it implies an increase in medical care costs
A Body Node (BN) can either be full function device (FFD) or reduce function device (RFD) and can respond to instructions received from the Body Network Controller (BNC)
By developing a system which is sensitive to changes of variables such as polling interval, traffic generated by sensors, priorities for monitoring or energy remaining in the system, we will make a significant contribution towards improving performance to maximize the Wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) lifetime
Summary
Life expectancy around the world has increased in the last years [1], which is good news, but it implies an increase in medical care costs. Life expectancy in the U.S has increased significantly; the number of adults between 60 and 80 years of age is expected to double in 2050 compared to the number registered in 2000 [3]. Life expectancy is not the only important factor for better medical care, e.g., traffic accidents call for better and opportunistic emergency health services. Adequate and immediate medical assistance after an accident can minimize the possibilities of permanent injury or even death. Traffic accidents in Mexico are one of the main causes of injuries according to INEGI 2011, and are the second leading cause of death [4].
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