Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

Performance assessment of a new intra-mobility solution for healthcare wireless sensor networks

The use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in healthcare is a key issue. These technologies can improve the way patients are monitored in an infirmary or a hospital. The healthcare WSNs (HWSNs) assume the use of WSNs for health support, collecting and send patients' health parameters wirelessly to remote monitoring systems. These applications bring many new challenges to traditional WSNs. These challenges include the continuous support connectivity to mobile nodes. The ability to let patients moving around when hospitalised is important to promote their quality of life. Managing the transitions of access points' attachment when a node moves across several coverage areas is on top of research topics in HWSNs. This paper studies the performance of a new handover mechanism to support intra-mobility of nodes for HWSN, called Hand4MAC. The evaluation is performed through a laboratory testbed and it was compared to the most used handover solutions. The results shown that Hand4MAC is more efficient in number of exchanged messages and it could ensure almost continuous connection to the nodes.

Intra-Mobility Support Solutions for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks–Handover Issues

At present, several solutions are available for monitoring patient health using body sensors. In hospitals, healthcare wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) offer support to access these sensors to allow for continuous patient monitoring. To improve the quality-of-life of the hospitalized patients, it is important to let them walk around the monitored area. This ability brings several challenges to HWSNs with mobility support. Because of the crucial importance of the sensed parameters, the HWSNs must be in continuous communication with the body sensors. The connection between body sensors and a HWSN is performed through an access point. Indoor communications are limited in terms of signal propagation and, therefore, several access points to cover large areas are deployed. To maintain the sensors' accessibility, these should frequently change their point of attachment by performing a mechanism known as a handover. Handover mechanisms are able to support the intra-mobility of sensors in networks within the same domain. This paper surveys the most recent intra-mobility solutions with special focus on handover approaches that can be used in HWSNs. An in depth review of the related literature is performed in order to present the state of the art on this paper, to discuss the available solutions, and to point out open issues for further research.

Optimized Congestion Management Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

The application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in healthcare is dominant and fast growing. In healthcare WSN applications (HWSNs) such as medical emergencies, the network may encounter an unpre...

Achieving Key Privacy and Invisibility for Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks in Healthcare

In this study, we propose an efficient aggregate signcryption scheme to maximize the security of data in a kind of wireless medical network named the disconnected or unattended wireless sensor network (applied in medical systems). These networks address patients who need to be monitored for a long time. The main challenge of these networks that are usually implanted on the patient's clothing and established in sensitive conditions is that the server (station) visits sensors continuously. Moreover, the sensors must retain data for long enough time to off-load to the station as they have limited capacity and batteries. This disconnected nature gives adversaries the power to read and modify target data without being detected or disclose private medical data related to a patient. In this paper, we address these security problems and improve the first study of identity-based aggregate signcryption in UWSNs to achieve both key privacy and invisibility. Our improved approach is at the same time efficient in terms of space and communication overload. Moreover, the proposed scheme allows servers to efficiently verify and unsigncrypt all the related data accumulated by sensors. We further show that the proposed scheme has resistance against reading and modifying attacks. We compare our scheme with the best alternative works in the literature.

HOCA: Healthcare Aware Optimized Congestion Avoidance and control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of small, low-power sensors that communicate through wireless links. Wireless sensor networks for healthcare have emerged in recent years as a result of the need to collect data about patients’ physical, physiological, and vital signs in the spaces ranging from personal to hospital and availability of the low cost sensors that enables this data collection. One of the major challenges in these networks is to mitigate congestion. In healthcare applications, such as medical emergencies or monitoring vital signs of patients, because of the importance and criticality of transmitted data, it is essential to avoid congestion as much as possible (and in cases when congestion avoidance is not possible, to control the congestion). In this paper, a data centric congestion management protocol using AQM (Active Queue Managements) is proposed for healthcare applications with respect to the inherent characteristics of these applications. This study deals with end to end delay, energy consumption, lifetime and fairness. The proposed protocol which is called HOCA avoids congestion in the first step (routing phase) using multipath and QoS (Quality of Service) aware routing. And in cases where congestion cannot be avoided, it will be mitigated via an optimized congestion control algorithm. The efficiency of HOCA was evaluated using the OPNET simulator. Simulation results indicated that HOCA was able to achieve its goals.

COCM: Class Based Optimized Congestion Management Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of numerous sensor nodes which can be used in many new emerging applications like healthcare. One of the major challenges in healthcare environments is to manage congestion, because in applications, such as medical emergencies or patients remote monitoring, transmitted data is important and critical. So it is essential in the first place to avoid congestion as much as possible and in cases when congestion avoidance is not possible, to control the congestion. In this paper, a class based congestion management protocol has been proposed for healthcare applications. We distinguish between sensitive, non-sensitive and control traffics, and service the input traffics based on their priority and quality of service requirements (QoS). The proposed protocol which is called COCM avoids congestion in the first step using multipath routing. The proposed AQM algorithm uses separate virtual queue's condition on a single physical queue to accept or drop the incoming packets. In cases where input traffic rate increases and congestion cannot be avoided, it mitigates congestion by using an optimized congestion control algorithm. This paper deals with parameters like end to end delay, packet loss, energy consumption, lifetime and fairness which are important in healthcare applications. The performance of COCM was evaluated using the OPNET simulator. Simulation results indicated that COCM achieves its goals.

Cognitive LF-Ant: A Novel Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, the authors present the Cognitive LF-Ant protocol for emergency reporting in healthcare wireless sensor networks. The protocol is inspired by the natural behaviour of ants and a cognitive component provides the capabilities to dynamically allocate resources, in accordance with the emergency degree of each patient. The intra-cluster emergency reporting is inspired by the different capabilities of leg-manipulated ants. The inter-cluster reporting is aided by the cooperative modulation diversity with spectrum sensing, which can detect new emergency reporting requests and forward them. Simulations results show the decrease of average delay time as the probability of opportunistic access increases, which privileges the emergency reporting related to the patients with higher priority of resources' usage. Furthermore, the packet loss rate is decreased by the use of cooperative modulation diversity with spectrum sensing.

A Survey of System Architecture Requirements for Health Care-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as a viable technology for a vast number of applications, including health care applications. To best support these health care applications, WSN technology can be adopted for the design of practical Health Care WSNs (HCWSNs) that support the key system architecture requirements of reliable communication, node mobility support, multicast technology, energy efficiency, and the timely delivery of data. Work in the literature mostly focuses on the physical design of the HCWSNs (e.g., wearable sensors, in vivo embedded sensors, et cetera). However, work towards enhancing the communication layers (i.e., routing, medium access control, et cetera) to improve HCWSN performance is largely lacking. In this paper, the information gleaned from an extensive literature survey is shared in an effort to fortify the knowledge base for the communication aspect of HCWSNs. We highlight the major currently existing prototype HCWSNs and also provide the details of their routing protocol characteristics. We also explore the current state of the art in medium access control (MAC) protocols for WSNs, for the purpose of seeking an energy efficient solution that is robust to mobility and delivers data in a timely fashion. Furthermore, we review a number of reliable transport layer protocols, including a network coding based protocol from the literature, that are potentially suitable for delivering end-to-end reliability of data transmitted in HCWSNs. We identify the advantages and disadvantages of the reviewed MAC, routing, and transport layer protocols as they pertain to the design and implementation of a HCWSN. The findings from this literature survey will serve as a useful foundation for designing a reliable HCWSN and also contribute to the development and evaluation of protocols for improving the performance of future HCWSNs. Open issues that required further investigations are highlighted.

An Efficient Mutual Authentication and Access Control Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Healthcare

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play an active role in the 21th Century Healthcare IT to reduce the healthcare cost and improve the quality of care. The protection of data confidentiality and patient privacy are the most critical requirements for the ubiquitous use of WSNs in healthcare environments. This requires a secure and lightweight user authentication and access control. Symmetric key - based access control is not suitable for WSNs in healthcare due to dynamic network topology, mobility, and stringent resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a secure, lightweight public key - based security scheme, Mutual Authentication and Access Control based on Elliptic curve cryptography (MAACE). MAACE is a mutual authentication protocol where a healthcare professional can authenticate to an accessed node (a PDA or medical sensor) and vice versa. This is to ensure that medical data is not exposed to an unauthorized person. On the other hand, it ensures that medical data sent to healthcare professionals did not originate from a malicious node. MAACE is more scalable and requires less memory compared to symmetric key-based schemes. Furthermore, it is much more lightweight than other public key-based schemes. Security analysis and performance evaluation results are presented and compared to existing schemes to show advantages of the proposed scheme.

Security management in Wireless Sensor Networks for healthcare

This paper first discusses emerging security threats, requirements and solutions for WSNs. In addition, the current applications and architectures of WSNs in healthcare systems are explained in detail. Then an assessment framework for WSN security for healthcare is developed to determine the security impact of WSNs on the healthcare applications. This framework will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each WSN security architecture and standard for healthcare. Lastly, solutions to close the gap between the existing and idea security will be proposed as well as the future directions for WSN security management.

Wireless Sensor Networks for Healthcare

Driven by the confluence between the need to collect data about people's physical, physiological, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral processes in spaces ranging from personal to urban and the recent availability of the technologies that enable this data collection, wireless sensor networks for healthcare have emerged in the recent years. In this review, we present some representative applications in the healthcare domain and describe the challenges they introduce to wireless sensor networks due to the required level of trustworthiness and the need to ensure the privacy and security of medical data. These challenges are exacerbated by the resource scarcity that is inherent with wireless sensor network platforms. We outline prototype systems spanning application domains from physiological and activity monitoring to large-scale physiological and behavioral studies and emphasize ongoing research challenges.

Wireless sensor networks for healthcare: A survey

Becoming mature enough to be used for improving the quality of life, wireless sensor network technologies are considered as one of the key research areas in computer science and healthcare application industries. The pervasive healthcare systems provide rich contextual information and alerting mechanisms against odd conditions with continuous monitoring. This minimizes the need for caregivers and helps the chronically ill and elderly to survive an independent life, besides provides quality care for the babies and little children whose both parents have to work. Although having significant benefits, the area has still major challenges which are investigated in this paper. We provide several state of the art examples together with the design considerations like unobtrusiveness, scalability, energy efficiency, security and also provide a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and challenges of these systems.

An Anycast-Based Emergency Service for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks

In this letter, we develop an anycast-based emergency service for healthcare wireless sensor networks. The new service could operate with sensors to detect and activate an alarm system based on predefined conditions that are specific to the patient and the disease. The new service is implemented on 802.15.4 ZigBee which usually has large control overhead and long transmission times. To improve the service performance, our service identifies the closest emergency service provider to alleviate the control overhead and achieve immediate assistance when a patient requests for an emergency service. We also increase the reliability of packet transmission by using a Recovery Point scheme. Our simulations and experiment demonstrate that our scheme is efficient and feasible for healthcare wireless sensor networks.

Lacas: learning automata-based congestion avoidance scheme for healthcare wireless sensor networks

One of the major challenges in wireless sensor network (WSN) research is to curb down congestion in the network's traffic, without compromising with the energy of the sensor nodes. Congestion affects the continuous flow of data, loss of information, delay in the arrival of data to the destination and unwanted consumption of significant amount of the very limited amount of energy in the nodes. Obviously, in healthcare WSN applications, particularly in the ones that cater to medical emergencies or in the ones that closely monitor critically ailing patients, it is desirable in the first place to avoid congestion from occurring and even if it occurs, to reduce the loss of data due to congestion. In this work, we address the problem of congestion in the nodes of healthcare WSN using a learning automata (LA)-based approach. Our primary objective in using this approach is to adaptively make the processing rate (data packet arrival rate) in the nodes equal to the transmitting rate (packet service rate), so that the occurrence of congestion in the nodes is seamlessly avoided. We maintain that the proposed algorithm, named as learning automata-based congestion avoidance algorithm in sensor networks (LACAS), can counter the congestion problem in healthcare WSNs effectively. An important feature of LACAS is that it intelligently' learns' from the past and improves its performance significantly as time progresses. Our proposed LA based model was evaluated using simulations representing healthcare WSNs. The results obtained through the experiments with respect to performance criteria having important implications in the healthcare domain, for example, the number of collisions, the energy consumption at the nodes, the network throughput, the number of unicast packets delivered, the number of packets delivered to each node, the signals received and forwarded to the medium access control (MAC) layer, and the change in energy consumption with variation in transmission range, have shown that the proposed algorithm is capable of successfully avoiding congestion in typical healthcare WSNs requiring a reliable congestion control mechanism.