Body Area Sensor Networks Research Articles

Design of SRAM cell for low power portable healthcare applications

Biomedical applications such as body area networks (BANs) require the design of power-efficient SRAM cells for the extended battery lives of BAN sensor nodes. In this work, we have proposed a bit-interleaving supporting, robust, low-power single-ended 9T (SE9T) bitcell. Design metrics of our bitcell are compared with several bitcells such as the 7T, FD8T and SEDF9T cells for their comparative analysis. The proposed cell shows 2.87×/3.36× higher RSNM than that of 7T/FD8T and 1.05×/1.5×/7.0× higher WSNM than that of 7T/FD8T/SEDF9T, 1.15×/1.06× and 1.54×/1.38× lower distribution in TRA and IREAD, respectively, compared to 7T/FD8T. In addition, the proposed cell shows 1.15×/1.22× shorter TWA when compared to SEDF9T/7T. Furthermore, SE9T cell consumes 10.80×/17.81× lower write power than that of SEDF9T/FD8T and 1.52×/18.37× lower read power than that of 7T/FD8T. It also exhibits 1.04×/2.92× lower leakage power dissipation than that of FD8T/7T. All these developments are obtained at a cost of 2.5× longer TWA, 1.73×/1.73× longer TRA when compared to FD8T and 7T/FD8T, and 1.64×/1.06× higher write power/read power than 7T/SEDF9T @ VDD = 700 mV.

AI for dynamic packet size optimization of batteryless IoT nodes: a case study for wireless body area sensor networks

Packet size optimization, with the purpose of minimizing the wireless packet transmission energy consumption, is crucial for the energy efficiency of the Internet of Things nodes. Meanwhile, energy scavenging from ambient energy sources has gained a significant attraction to avoid battery issues as the number of nodes increasingly grows. Packet size optimization algorithms have so far been proposed for battery-powered networks that have limited total energy with continuous power availability to prolong their lifetime. On the other hand, batteryless networks based on energy harvesting offer unlimited total energy with the interruption in availability. This is due to changing ambient conditions or the required time for harvesting and storing in small capacitors. Packet size optimization of batteryless networks has not been addressed so far. In this paper, an AI-based packet size optimization algorithm is proposed for batteryless networks that consider the amount of harvested energy at each node. Therefore, packet size is optimized dynamically for each round of data transmission. The proposed method is then evaluated via numerical simulations for a heterogenous wireless body area sensor network as a case study, considering 1-hop, cooperative, and 2-hop communication networks. Cooperative topology yields optimum energy efficiency for highly dynamic sensors, such as ECG, while 2-hop has shown to be optimum for the same type of sensors in battery-powered networks. Also, for sensors with slower dynamics such as body temperature, 1-hop turns out to be optimum in networks solely dependent on energy scavenging while cooperative topology is optimum for battery-powered networks. The algorithm applies to any heterogeneous fully batteryless networks to dynamically optimize packet size at each transmission instance.

Encryption-free data transmission and hand-over in two-tier body area networks

Background and Objective: Deployment of Body Area Networks (BAN) in hospitals can enable real time data collection and analysis for patient health. Such networks have a two-tier structure: the primary layer consists of nodes that are installed on hospital facilities, while the second tier contains sensors on patient body. The unique two-tier network structure poses challenges to secure and continuous information transmission between sensors and data servers, especially when patients are moving. We plan to design a suite of mechanisms to support power efficient and secure data collection and smooth hand-over of sensors when patients move freely in a hospital.Methods: We assume that both group and individual secrets can be provided to BAN sensors when a patient checks in to the hospital. We first design mechanisms that use hash chains and double exclusive-or operations to protect data confidentiality and authenticity from BAN sensors. When a patient moves, the top tier nodes installed on the hospital facilities can provide smooth hand-over of the BAN sensors through secret updates. Our mechanisms can support network dynamics and changes of sensors in BAN networks.Results: We present the proposed mechanisms in details. We analyze the power efficiency of the approaches. We compare the power consumption of the proposed approach to those of the three security levels of IEEE 802.15.6 standard. Using formal methods, we prove the safety of the mechanisms. We also study the robustness of the approaches against various attacks.Conclusions: In summary, we design a suite of mechanisms to support secure and continuous data collection from body sensors on patients in hospitals. The approaches are secure and efficient, which satisfy the requirements of future smart health applications.

Photo-Rechargeable Fabrics as Sustainable and Robust Power Sources for Wearable Bioelectronics

<h2>Summary</h2> Smart textiles for electricity generation are a superior energy solution with greatly improved convenience and comfort for wearable bioelectronics. However, maintaining the sustainability and stability of the power supply, though highly desirable, remains a great challenge. Here, we present a photo-rechargeable fabric with economically viable materials and scalable fabrication technologies. The fabric was able to constantly deliver electric power for 10 min at 0.1 mA after being charged for 1 min under the standard 1-sun condition. It can also work normally under twisted and watery circumstances and hold the stored energy for over 60 days without significant voltage loss. The photo-rechargeable fabric was demonstrated to power a body area sensor network for personalized healthcare.

Blockchain leveraged decentralized IoT eHealth framework

Blockchain technologies recently emerging for eHealth, can facilitate a secure, decentralized and patient-driven, record management system. However, Blockchain technologies cannot accommodate the storage of data generated from IoT devices in remote patient management (RPM) settings as this application requires a fast consensus mechanism, careful management of keys and enhanced protocols for privacy. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain leveraged decentralized eHealth architecture which comprises three layers: (1) The Sensing layer – Body Area Sensor Networks include medical sensors typically on or in a patient body transmitting data to a smartphone. (2) The NEAR processing layer – Edge Networks consist of devices at one hop from data sensing IoT devices. (3) The FAR processing layer – Core Networks comprise Cloud or other high computing servers). A Patient Agent (PA) software replicated on the three layers processes medical data to ensure reliable, secure and private communication. The PA executes a lightweight Blockchain consensus mechanism and utilizes a Blockchain leveraged task-offloading algorithm to ensure patient’s privacy while outsourcing tasks. Performance analysis of the decentralized eHealth architecture has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the system in the processing and storage of RPM data.

Light weight security scheme in wireless body area sensor network using logistic chaotic scheme

WBAN is a boon to humanity that can track the physiological activities of humans irrespective of location and time. However, the major concerns about WBAN are the security and privacy of the health data. The health data should be secured to ensure prevention of misuse of data. On the other hand, the health data about the patient must reach the physician at the right time, without any delay. As security impact over the lives of human, an effective model named as SEKBAN (Secure Key Management in WBAN) is presented that concerns about security at three phases. This proposed approach ensures the security of the data by establishing keys based on the ECG signal.

Light weight security scheme in wireless body area sensor network using logistic chaotic scheme

Light weight security scheme in wireless body area sensor network using logistic chaotic scheme

Energy-Efficiency Maximization of Self-Sustained Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

Electronic health monitoring is one of the major applications of wireless body area networks (WBANs) that helps with early detection of any abnormal physiological symptoms. In this letter, we propose and solve an optimization problem that maximizes the energy efficiency (EE) of WBAN consisting of sensor nodes (SNs) equipped with energy harvesting capabilities communicating with an aggregator. We exploit the structure of the optimization problem to provide a suboptimal solution at a lower computational complexity, and derive the mathematical expressions of upper and lower bounds of the source rates of the SN. The simulation results reveal that the optimal allocation of the source rate to energy critical SNs improves the system performance of WBAN in terms of EE during different everyday activities.

A Multiobjective, Lion Mating Optimization Inspired Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Sensor Network Based Healthcare Applications.

The importance of body area sensor networks (BASNs) is increasing day by day because of their increasing use in Internet of things (IoT)-enabled healthcare application services. They help humans in improving their quality of life by continuously monitoring various vital signs through biosensors strategically placed on the human body. However, BASNs face serious challenges, in terms of the short life span of their batteries and unreliable data transmission, because of the highly unstable and unpredictable channel conditions of tiny biosensors located on the human body. These factors may result in poor data gathering quality in BASNs. Therefore, a more reliable data transmission mechanism is greatly needed in order to gather quality data in BASN-based healthcare applications. Therefore, this study proposes a novel, multiobjective, lion mating optimization inspired routing protocol, called self-organizing multiobjective routing protocol (SARP), for BASN-based IoT healthcare applications. The proposed routing scheme significantly reduces local search problems and finds the best dynamic cluster-based routing solutions between the source and destination in BASNs. Thus, it significantly improves the overall packet delivery rate, residual energy, and throughput with reduced latency and packet error rates in BASNs. Extensive simulation results validate the performance of our proposed SARP scheme against the existing routing protocols in terms of the packet delivery ratio, latency, packet error rate, throughput, and energy efficiency for BASN-based health monitoring applications.

Wireless Body Area Sensor Network: Tutorial Review

Sensor networks that utilises wireless technology can be broken down into many smaller fields, one of it is known as Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN). Its inception is the product of advanced progress made in sensor networks that utilises wireless technology. Immense progress amassed in terms of technology has culminated in the creation of user-friendly technology that could be worn and minute-sized electronic parts. Consequently, this area of study has achieved huge interest prevalently as the result of its wide and diverse range of implementations, especially in the medical sector that deals with wellbeing and care. Current day scenario observes the existence of minute sensors that are enabled to be posited on the human anatomy for purposes of documentation on an assortment of physical constants to reciprocate appropriate responses. Hence, it forms a perceptive and vigilant scheme that can provide a prompt notification towards acute and complex health incidences, and can be utilised for diagnostic purposes to treat diseases. In view of the topic being of broad and current interest, the objective of this study is engaged in the presentation of a multiplex component of cutting-edge WBASN. This involves the transmission structures, applications in WBASN, programming core, concerns on security, and routing conventions that is adept in its use of energy. We endeavour to encapsulate the most up-to-date progress and expounded on the scientific mechanics of radio that is available that is related to this kind of network. Prospective perspectives and problems will be deliberated pertaining this aspect.

Energy-Efficient Elderly Fall Detection System Based on Power Reduction and Wireless Power Transfer.

Elderly fall detection systems based on wireless body area sensor networks (WBSNs) have increased significantly in medical contexts. The power consumption of such systems is a critical issue influencing the overall practicality of the WBSN. Reducing the power consumption of these networks while maintaining acceptable performance poses a challenge. Several power reduction techniques can be employed to tackle this issue. A human vital signs monitoring system (HVSMS) has been proposed here to measure vital parameters of the elderly, including heart rate and fall detection based on heartbeat and accelerometer sensors, respectively. In addition, the location of elderly people can be determined based on Global Positioning System (GPS) and transmitted with their vital parameters to emergency medical centers (EMCs) via the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network. In this paper, the power consumption of the proposed HVSMS was minimized by merging a data-event (DE) algorithm and an energy-harvesting-technique-based wireless power transfer (WPT). The DE algorithm improved HVSMS power consumption, utilizing the duty cycle of the sleep/wake mode. The WPT successfully charged the HVSMS battery. The results demonstrated that the proposed DE algorithm reduced the current consumption of the HVSMS to 9.35 mA compared to traditional operation at 85.85 mA. Thus, an 89% power saving was achieved based on the DE algorithm and the battery life was extended to 30 days instead of 3 days (traditional operation). In addition, the WPT was able to charge the HVSMS batteries once every 30 days for 10 h, thus eliminating existing restrictions involving the use of wire charging methods. The results indicate that the HVSMS current consumption outperformed existing solutions from previous studies.

Priority Based Data Transmission for WBAN

&lt;span&gt;Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) or Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a growing field in healthcare applications. It enables remote monitoring of patient’s physiological data through wireless communication. It is composed of sensor network which collects physiological data from the patient. There are several issues concerning WBAN such as security, power, routing protocol to address QoS metrics (reliability, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency), etc. The focus of the study is the issue on different QoS metrics. There were several QoS aware routing protocol that has been proposed which implements multiple queues for different types of data. However, one issue on multiple queue system is starvation, end-to-end delay, and reliability. The study proposed an efficient priority queue based data transmission that improves the end-to-end delay, reliability, and queuing delay of QoS aware routing protocol.&lt;/span&gt;

Reducing End to End Delay Through Adaptive Greedy Search Algorithm for Wireless Body Area Sensor Network

Wireless Body area network is the most important research topic. It is under developing technology in the field of human health care. Body Area Sensor Network plays an important role to improve human health. In the proposed work implementation of wireless body area network connected through hibernating greedy algorithm is developed. The ultimate aim of the system is to reduce the end to end delay of the data transmission. Mobile network is used here and MATLAB based reconfigurable AI-Greedy Search algorithm is developed here. The proposed work enable the fast data transmission as well as Adaptive (adjustable network path) depends on the connective needs of the system.

An Edge-Fog Secure Self-Authenticable Data Transfer Protocol.

Development of the Internet of Things (IoT) opens many new challenges. As IoT devices are getting smaller and smaller, the problems of so-called “constrained devices” arise. The traditional Internet protocols are not very well suited for constrained devices comprising localized network nodes with tens of devices primarily communicating with each other (e.g., various sensors in Body Area Network communicating with each other). These devices have very limited memory, processing, and power resources, so traditional security protocols and architectures also do not fit well. To address these challenges the Fog computing paradigm is used in which all constrained devices, or Edge nodes, primarily communicate only with less-constrained Fog node device, which collects all data, processes it and communicates with the outside world. We present a new lightweight secure self-authenticable transfer protocol (SSATP) for communications between Edge nodes and Fog nodes. The primary target of the proposed protocol is to use it as a secure transport for CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol) in place of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) and DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security), which are traditional choices in this scenario. SSATP uses modified header fields of standard UDP packets to transfer additional protocol handling and data flow management information as well as user data authentication information. The optional redundant data may be used to provide increased resistance to data losses when protocol is used in unreliable networks. The results of experiments presented in this paper show that SSATP is a better choice than UDP with DTLS in the cases, where the CoAP block transfer mode is used and/or in lossy networks.

A wireless body area sensor network based on stretchable passive tags

A body area sensor network (bodyNET) is a collection of networked sensors that can be used to monitor human physiological signals. For its application in next-generation personalized healthcare systems, seamless hybridization of stretchable on-skin sensors and rigid silicon readout circuits is required. Here, we report a bodyNET composed of chip-free and battery-free stretchable on-skin sensor tags that are wirelessly linked to flexible readout circuits attached to textiles. Our design offers a conformal skin-mimicking interface by removing all direct contacts between rigid components and the human body. Therefore, this design addresses the mechanical incompatibility issue between soft on-skin devices and rigid high-performance silicon electronics. Additionally, we introduce an unconventional radiofrequency identification technology where wireless sensors are deliberately detuned to increase the tolerance of strain-induced changes in electronic properties. Finally, we show that our soft bodyNET system can be used to simultaneously and continuously analyse a person’s pulse, breath and body movement. By integrating wireless stretchable on-skin sensor tags and flexible readout circuits attached to textiles using an unconventional radiofrequency identification design, a body area sensor network can be created that can continuously analyse a person’s pulse, breathing and body movement.

Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Ambient Assisted Living Environment

Ambient assisted living (AAL) is focused on providing assistance to patients primarily in their natural environment to improve their quality of life. AAL domain has evolved at a fast pace as the stakeholders of AAL include patients and their relatives, social services, and care givers. AAL follows a multi-tier architecture where data from body area sensor network (BAN) gets routed through the coordinator of such networks via cellular devices or display co-ordinators at hospitals to a remote server over the Internet. A BAN configuration comprises of wearable and/or implantable sensors attached to a patient that are connected to a coordinator node carried by the patient. Though many routing protocols are proposed for routing within BAN, the challenges behind routing data from the coordinator of BAN to the cellular devices or display co-ordinators at hospitals is hardly investigated. But this routing is important for establishing end-to-end communication in AAL. Consequently, in this paper, we propose a multi-hop routing protocol that routes data from body sensor networks to the cellular devices or display co-ordinators. In a hospital scenario, there can be multiple display co-ordinators in vicinity of a coordinator of BAN, thus making this routing problem multi-sink one. Moreover, in a hospital, there can be multiple patients having wearable or implantable sensors attached to them forming multiple BAN configurations in vicinity. Thus, packet transmission from BAN coordinator may interfere with the transmission of a neighboring one. The proposed routing protocol is designed to avoid such inter BAN interference. The protocol is simulated using Castalia simulator and results show that the proposed protocol achieves better balance between energy efficiency and throughput as compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

An Advanced First Aid System Based on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and a Wireless Body Area Sensor Network for Elderly Persons in Outdoor Environments.

For elderly persons, a fall can cause serious injuries such as a hip fracture or head injury. Here, an advanced first aid system is proposed for monitoring elderly patients with heart conditions that puts them at risk of falling and for providing first aid supplies using an unmanned aerial vehicle. A hybridized fall detection algorithm (FDB-HRT) is proposed based on a combination of acceleration and a heart rate threshold. Five volunteers were invited to evaluate the performance of the heartbeat sensor relative to a benchmark device, and the extracted data was validated using statistical analysis. In addition, the accuracy of fall detections and the recorded locations of fall incidents were validated. The proposed FDB-HRT algorithm was 99.16% and 99.2% accurate with regard to heart rate measurement and fall detection, respectively. In addition, the geolocation error of patient fall incidents based on a GPS module was evaluated by mean absolute error analysis for 17 different locations in three cities in Iraq. Mean absolute error was 1.08 × 10−5° and 2.01 × 10−5° for latitude and longitude data relative to data from the GPS Benchmark system. In addition, the results revealed that in urban areas, the UAV succeeded in all missions and arrived at the patient’s locations before the ambulance, with an average time savings of 105 s. Moreover, a time saving of 31.81% was achieved when using the UAV to transport a first aid kit to the patient compared to an ambulance. As a result, we can conclude that when compared to delivering first aid via ambulance, our design greatly reduces delivery time. The proposed advanced first aid system outperformed previous systems presented in the literature in terms of accuracy of heart rate measurement, fall detection, and information messages and UAV arrival time.

Quality of Information Analysis in WSN: An Application in BASN

Topology control deals with reducing the power consumption of WSN nodes by making use of quality of information parameters such as Received Signal Strength (RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator (LQI). This paper deals with Link Quality Estimation(LQE), which is a prominent criterion in designing a Topology Control aware higher layer routing protocol for WSN. An improved LQE is designed for the AODV routing protocol, which has been applied in Body Area Sensor Networks. Simulation study shows that the proposed estimator gives an enhanced performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Empirical analysis using TelosB motes are carried out to estimate distance from RSSI measurements, using log normal path loss model. The experiments are performed both in the indoor and outdoor scenario and the amount of error deviation of the estimated distance is calculated. The root mean square of the distance error value obtained can be used as a threshold value in the distance noise model used in localization. Localized sensor nodes is widely used in BASN applications for mapping the exact user location and the routing of packets also will be more accurate.

Experimental research of turbo-codes application in telemedicine systems with wireless body area sensor networks

Experimental research of turbo-codes application in telemedicine systems with wireless body area sensor networks

Fast Pattern Discovery in Healthcare Data Using Graphics Processors

The mobile medical diagnosis and health monitoring system helps in managing the various chronic diseases like asthma, blood pressure and heart diseases etc. in consultation with the remotely available physicians by initiating the emergency call automatically on the physician’s mobile phone and providing the on-line vital medical parameters captured by the body area sensor network of the patient. We observed that a GPU based solution can outperform a CPU based solution by more than 30% in terms of speed up, while giving same accuracy of results, divided among healthy, normal and unhealthy patients. Finally, key parameter to model our health care data likestandard deviations of {1, 0.5, 0.5}, means of {(1, 1), (0, 0), (-1,-1)} are used to study healthy persons and unhealthy patients.&#x0D; Keywords: Healthcare ; GPU; EEG; PCG; datastructure