Toward an Advanced Human Monitoring System Based on a Smart Body Area Network for Industry Use

Abstract

This research provides a study on a smart body area network (SmartBAN) physical layer (PHY), as an of the Internet of medical things (IoMT) technology, for an advanced human monitoring system in industrial use. The SmartBAN provides a new PHY and a medium access control (MAC) layer, improving its performance and providing very low-latency emergency information transmission with low energy consumption compared with other wireless body area network (WBAN) standards. On the other hand, IoMT applications are expected to become more advanced with smarter wearable devices, such as augmented reality-based human monitoring and work support in a factory. Therefore, it is possible to develop more advanced human monitoring systems for industrial use by combining the SmartBAN with multimedia devices. However, the SmartBAN PHY is not designed to transmit multimedia information such as audio and video. To address this issue, multilevel phase shift keying (PSK) modulation is applied to the SmartBAN PHY, and the symbol rate is improved by setting the roll-off rate appropriately to realize the system. The numerical results show that a sufficient link budget, receiver sensitivity and fade margin were obtained even when those approaches were applied to the SmartBAN PHY. The results indicate that these techniques are required for high-quality audio or video transmission, as well as vital sign data transmission, in a SmartBAN.