Wireless Technology for Pervasive Healthcare

Abstract

Guest Editorial Each human being is unique. This requires medical decisions, practices, and products being tailored to the individual patient. To allow good medical practices, it is necessary to know the history and the genetic predisposition of individuals, as well as their current lifestyle and daily routine. In some cases, the data needed to assess the good functioning and evaluate the performance of a human body can be even larger, e.g. with elderly people, children, athletes, disabled people and people who had health problems in the past. Personalized medicine demands an increased focus on preparing pervasive healthcare systems and applications deployed around users and capable of remotely caring for them and improving their health and well-being anywhere anytime. These systems and applications require a sophisticated integration of microcircuit, medical sensing, and wireless and mobile technologies. They largely benefit users by decreasing the dependability on special caregivers and eventually reducing healthcare expenses through a more efficient use of healthcare resources and an earlier detection of life-threatening emergency situations. However, the realization of pervasive healthcare sets some additional critical requirements, e.g. realtimeness and faulttolerance, and reliability, security and efficiency challenges compared with traditional hospital-based systems. Exploitation of Information and Communications Technologies as well as Networking and Sensors Technologies will enable cost-effective and efficient healthcare delivery, capable to deal with physical and logical mobility of patients and devices. This special issue consists of six papers. Each submission underwent three rounds of review with at least three reviewers per round. The selected papers cover different aspects of wireless pervasive healthcare systems along which this special issue has been organized, and range from modeling efforts of the physical phenomena behind the intra/extra body communications to smartphone health applications based on community interactions, including intelligent data collection techniques based on the sensors embedded in the mobile devices as well as transport approaches and systems for dispatching the collected data. The first paper entitled “Channel and Error Modeling for Wireless Body Area Networks” by Saeed Rashwand and Jelena Misic investigates the channel models and error performance formalization for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In the first phase of this work, the authors study channel fading models for WBANs. In the second phase, they survey the models which calculate the error performance metrics in WBANs. Then, they select most appropriate error models to design and develop the error performance evaluation models for IEEE 802.15.6-based WBANs and show how to integrate them with the error model in Medium Access Control (MAC). Finally, they discuss integrated PHY and MAC error performance in WBANs. The second paper “Smart Collaborative Mobile System for Taking Care of Disabled and Elderly People” by Sandra G. Fortino Department of Informatics, Modeling, Electronics and Systems (DIMES), University of Calabria (Unical), Rende, Italy