Medical Wireless Body Area Networks Research Articles

A novel fusion-based approach for the classification of packets in wireless body area networks

This abstract focuses on the significance of wireless body area networks (WBANs) as a cutting-edge and self-governing technology, which has garnered substantial attention from researchers. The central challenge faced by WBANs revolves around upholding quality of service (QoS) within rapidly evolving sectors like healthcare. The intricate task of managing diverse traffic types with limited resources further compounds this challenge. Particularly in medical WBANs, the prioritization of vital data is crucial to ensure prompt delivery of critical information. Given the stringent requirements of these systems, any data loss or delays are untenable, necessitating the implementation of intelligent algorithms. These algorithms play a pivotal role in expediting diagnosis and treatment processes during medical emergencies. This study introduces an innovative protocol termed collaborative binary Naive Bayes decision tree (CBNBDT) designed to enhance packet classification and transmission prioritization. Through the utilization of this protocol, incoming packets are categorized based on their respective classes, enabling subsequent prioritization. Thorough simulations have demonstrated the superior performance of the proposed CBNBDT protocol compared to baseline approaches.

Low-profile Button Sensor Antenna Design for Wireless Medical Body Area Networks.

A button sensor antenna (BSA) for wireless medical body area networks (WMBAN) is presented, which works through the IEEE 802.11b/g/n standard. Due to strong interaction between the sensor antenna and the body, a new robust system is designed with a small footprint that can serve on- and off-body healthcare applications. The measured and simulated results are matched well. The design offers a wide range of omnidirectional radiation patterns in free space, with a reflection coefficient (S11) of -29.30 (-30.97) dB in the lower (upper) bands. S11 reaches up to -23.07 (-27.07) dB and -30.76 (-31.12) dB on the body chest and arm, respectively. The Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) values are below the regulatory limitations for both 1-gram (1.6 W/Kg) and 10-gram tissues (2.0 W/Kg). Experimental tests of the read range validate the results of a maximum coverage range of 40 meters. Clinical Relevance- WMBAN technology allows for continuous monitoring and analysis of patient health data to improve the quality of healthcare services.

Design of Flexible Meander Line Antenna for Healthcare in Wireless Body Area Network Systems.

A flexible meander line monopole antenna (MMA) is presented in this paper. The antenna can be worn for on-and off-body applications. The overall dimension of the MMA is 37 mm x 50 mm x 2.37 mms, The MMA was manufactured and measured, and the results matched with simulation results. The MMA design shows a bandwidth of up to 1282.4 (450.5) MHz and provides gains of 3.03 (4.85) dBi in two operating bands, respectively, showing omnidirectional radiation patterns in free space. While worn on the chest or arm, bandwidths as high as 688.9 (500.9) MHz and 1261.7 (524.2) MHz, and the gains of 3.80 (4.67) dBi and 3.00 (4.55) dBi were observed. The experimental measurements of the read range confirmed. Clinical Relevance- Wireless Medical Body Area Network (WMBAN) technology allows for continuous monitoring and analysis of patient health data to improve the quality of healthcare services.

An Efficient and Compact Monopole Antenna Backed With Square Loop EBG Structure for Medical Wireless Body Area Network Applications

AbstractIn this paper, a compact, low‐profile, and simple monopole antenna is presented that is operated at the frequency of 2.4 GHz in industrial scientific medical band. The monopole antenna is based on the simple rectangular microstrip patch with a rotated T‐shaped slot. Furthermore, a 2 × 2 electromagnetic band‐gap (EBG) array is used in this design to act as an isolator between the antenna and the human body, which additionally increases the performance of the proposed antenna. The final design has an overall size of only 0.9λg × 0.9λg × 0.034λg (60 × 60 × 2.3 mm3) where λg is the guided‐wavelength with respect to RO4003 substrate at the resonant frequency of 2.4 GHz. This can make the structure a good candidate for wireless body area network applications. A prototype of the designed EBG‐based antenna is fabricated over a widely available RO4003 substrate. The measurement results show a gain of 6.52 dBi, a front to back ratio of 12.12 dB, and a total efficiency of 79.87% around the resonant frequency. Furthermore, numerical studies are conducted to evaluate the specific absorption rate (SAR) of the proposed design, which shows by introducing the EBG structure, more than 96% reduction in SAR level is obtained. All simulations are carried out by CST microwave studio software.

Proposed Transport Protocols Suite for Wireless Medical Body Area Networks

Proposed Transport Protocols Suite for Wireless Medical Body Area Networks

A lightweight continuous authentication scheme for medical wireless body area networks

A lightweight continuous authentication scheme for medical wireless body area networks

VLC, OCC, IR and LiFi Reliable Optical Wireless Technologies to be Embedded in Medical Facilities and Medical Devices.

New, emerging technologies, transform every day our life and have direct consequence on our health and well-being. More and more wearable medical devices (MD) with wireless communication technologies embedded are being developed by innovative academic community and companies. Optical wireless communication (OWC) consisting of Visible Light Communication (VLC), infrared (IR), Optical Camera Communication (OCC) and Light Fidelity (LiFi) along with the conventional Radio Frequency (RF) wireless communication are suitable technologies to be used for hybrid Wireless Integrated Medical Assistance Systems (WIMAS). The WIMAS addressed in this paper consists of two Wireless Medical Body Area Networks (WMBAN) (an insulin wearable kit and an ECG test device with VLC/OCC are considered) and an Emergency Remote Medical Assistance (ERMA) with LiFi technology embedded. Using RF in medical facilities is subject of strict regulations due to interferences with other RF medical devices, negative effects on human health and lack of security. VLC and OCC are suitable to be embedded in MDs in order to be used by the patients with wearable WMBAN. Research on IR transdermal communication for implantable MDs has also been demonstrated as feasible and both VLC and OCC have promising future, as well. On the other hand, LiFi technology, recently deployed on the market, is mature enough to be integrated in the ERMA system addressed here.

A polling access control with exhaustive service in wireless body area networks for mobile healthcare using the sleeping schema

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) play an important role in human health monitoring for mobile healthcare. The improvement of service performance and low-power consumption are the two challenges for these medical WBANs, because those energy-limited wireless medical sensors must transmit the monitoring data to the personal server (PS) via intra-WBAN in time. Further, precise mathematical modeling combining with the sleeping state to measure this improvement theoretically is still lack. Therefore, a polling control with exhaustive service using the sleeping schema is proposed to address the problems in WBANs communication for smart health. Based on the managed access phase (MAP) specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, it has been attempting to improve the energy efficiency through a self-managing sleeping schema for both the sensor nodes and the PS according to the load in intra-WBANs, in which the node will soon turn to sleep upon completion of transmitting all its current data packets. Additionally, by employing the embedded Markov chain and probability generating function, the proposed model is established, and the performance characteristics—the mean cyclic period and queue length at the polling moment—were accurately obtained to justify the service performance can be guaranteed. In addition, the expressions of the quantitative relationship among sleeping time, performance characteristics and network parameters were derived in closed form, which can easily evaluate the energy efficiency. Simulations were carried out to justify this model.

Design Considerations for a Sub-mW Wireless Medical Body-Area Network Receiver Front End

Wireless medical body-area networks are used to connect sensor nodes that monitor vital parameters. The radio consumes a large portion of the sensor energy budget, and hence its power dissipation should be minimized. The low-noise amplifier (LNA) is an important component of the receiver, and must guarantee low-noise amplification and impedance matching. In this work, an ultra-low-voltage ultra-low-power LNA is proposed that, thanks to the proposed transformer-based gate boosting technique, has a reduced current consumption of only 160 μA and can operate with a supply as low as 0.18 V. The LNA was designed using 40 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology and features a voltage gain of 14 dB, 5.2 dB NF and −8.6 dBm IIP3. This performance is comparable to a prior work by the same authors, but with the minimum supply voltage reduced by a factor of 4x.

Technologies and Challenges for Cognitive Radio Enabled Medical Wireless Body Area Networks

We present a review of spectrum sharing wireless body area networks. We investigate how cognitive radio (CR) and dynamic spectrum access are used for body area networks to save spectral resources. Specifically, we study the features associated with the usage of the three major CR paradigms of underlay, interweave, and overlay in these networks. We further put forward some use cases in medical applications. In this regard, we provide an overview of the existing schemes on interference mitigation for coexistence of different devices involving wireless body area networks. Further, we proceed with existing energy efficient medium access control protocols for CR-enabled body area networks. In addition, we outline the challenges and obstacles of implementing spectrum sharing concepts for body sensor networks.

An Adaptive Algorithm to Improve Energy Efficiency in Wearable Activity Recognition Systems

Activity recognition systems are used in rehabilitation centres to monitor activity of daily living in order to assess daily functional status of elderly. A low-cost, non-invasive, and continuous wearable activity monitoring system can be realized by one or multiple wearable sensor nodes to form a self-managing wireless medical body area network. There are several arising challenges essential to be dealt within developing wearable activity recognition systems, namely sensor node lifetime and detection accuracy. This paper investigates existing solutions, which address the key opposing challenges. We propose a feedback controller algorithm to dynamically adapt sampling rate for maintaining the tradeoff between the energy efficiency and accuracy. The Number of samples and transmitted data packets is the main sources of energy consumption that impacts the system accuracy. To validate the accuracy of our proposed algorithm, a public wearable activity recognition data set is constructed. The data set is collected from 20 healthy subjects over 7 activity types excluding the transition states, using up to four accelerometer sensors connected with IEEE 802.15.4 enabled nodes in our setup. Our proposed feedback controller algorithm nearly doubles the activity recognition system lifetime. This, in turn improves the users’ quality of experience by reducing the demand for battery replacements while the accuracy of detection is maintained at the same level.

Proposed Transport Protocols Suite for Wireless Medical Body Area Networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) is the recent trend for localized and personalized medical services. For that purpose, several tele-medicine architectures and WBAN frameworks for patient monitoring have been proposed. This paper presents a new medical protocol MESETP (Medical Services Transport Protocol), that underlies data delivery for both real-time and non real-time medical services. Furthermore, performance tests of MESETP with existing real time protocols and non real-time protocols used by existing medical services are examined and comparison results are presented.

Optical Wireless Links as an Alternative to Radio-Frequency for Medical Body Area Networks

It is now established that optical wireless communications (OWC) technology is a promising alternative or a complement to radio-frequencies for indoor transmissions. Considering that using OWC permits the reduction of electromagnetic pollution in human environment, this technology can be also a good candidate for wireless body area networks (WBANs) in particular for medical applications such as health monitoring. In this paper, we investigate the use of on-body OWC for mobile medical WBAN. Based on transmission scheme exploiting diffuse optical reflections over the patient environment, we investigate a star BAN topology using spreading codes for multiple access. We have developed a theoretical analysis to determine the performance of such network considering that the patient is moving in the room. The achievable quality of service for a typical health monitoring application is reported and discussed regarding the performance required by medical applications.

Secure publish-subscribe protocols for heterogeneous medical wireless body area networks.

Security and privacy issues in medical wireless body area networks (WBANs) constitute a major unsolved concern because of the challenges posed by the scarcity of resources in WBAN devices and the usability restrictions imposed by the healthcare domain. In this paper, we describe a WBAN architecture based on the well-known publish-subscribe paradigm. We present two protocols for publishing data and sending commands to a sensor that guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control. Both protocols are based on a recently proposed ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme that is lightweight enough to be embedded into wearable sensors. We show how sensors can implement lattice-based access control (LBAC) policies using this scheme, which are highly appropriate for the eHealth domain. We report experimental results with a prototype implementation demonstrating the suitability of our proposed solution.

ABS Scheduling Technique for Interference Mitigation of M2M Based Medical WBAN Service

A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a technology for transmitting relevant device data from information terminals attached to the body. Since it does not need connection lines, it is more conven...

Online anomaly detection in wireless body area networks for reliable healthcare monitoring.

In this paper, we propose a lightweight approach for online detection of faulty measurements by analyzing the data collected from medical wireless body area networks. The proposed framework performs sequential data analysis using a smart phone as a base station, and takes into account the constrained resources of the smart phone, such as processing power and storage capacity. The main objective is to raise alarms only when patients enter in an emergency situation, and to discard false alarms triggered by faulty measurements or ill-behaved sensors. The proposed approach is based on the Haar wavelet decomposition, nonseasonal Holt-Winters forecasting, and the Hampel filter for spatial analysis, and on for temporal analysis. Our objective is to reduce false alarms resulting from unreliable measurements and to reduce unnecessary healthcare intervention. We apply our proposed approach on real physiological dataset. Our experimental results prove the effectiveness of our approach in achieving good detection accuracy with a low false alarm rate. The simplicity and the processing speed of our proposed framework make it useful and efficient for real time diagnosis.

A utility maximization approach for information-communication tradeoff in Wireless Body Area Networks

Healthcare systems have made a dramatic shift towards ubiquitous monitoring in the recent past. The reasons for such a change have been ease of timely diagnosis, convenience and comfort of clinical treatments. Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are mainly characterized by deployment of biomedical sensors around human body which transmit vital signs measurements about the health status of the patient. Unfortunately, the huge traffic load of clinical data and limited resources of biomedical sensors make the efficiency of long-term operations almost impossible. Therefore, it is necessary to make significant advances in sensor's energy saving. Our idea is to reduce the activities of some sensors depending on the relevance between the data they measure and the diseases to detect. This paper shows how to extend the lifetime of medical WBANs by appropriately taking benefit of correlation between the knowledge about the disease and sensing data to drive the best scheduling of the medical sensors. For that, the theoretical framework of an economic approach, i.e., network utility maximization, is developed for sensor scheduling under operations cost constraint. It is shown that the compact subset of sensors can be found to provide necessary information for timely and correct diagnoses. Based on the theoretical framework, an algorithm combining sensor selection and information gain is then proposed. Simulation results show that the algorithm achieves high performance in terms of energy saving vs latency in disease detection.

Anomaly Detection in Medical Wireless Sensor Networks using SVM and Linear Regression Models

This paper details the architecture and describes the preliminary experimentation with the proposed framework for anomaly detection in medical wireless body area networks for ubiquitous patient and healthcare monitoring. The architecture integrates novel data mining and machine learning algorithms with modern sensor fusion techniques. Knowing wireless sensor networks are prone to failures resulting from their limitations (i.e. limited energy resources and computational power), using this framework, the authors can distinguish between irregular variations in the physiological parameters of the monitored patient and faulty sensor data, to ensure reliable operations and real time global monitoring from smart devices. Sensor nodes are used to measure characteristics of the patient and the sensed data is stored on the local processing unit. Authorized users may access this patient data remotely as long as they maintain connectivity with their application enabled smart device. Anomalous or faulty measurement data resulting from damaged sensor nodes or caused by malicious external parties may lead to misdiagnosis or even death for patients. The authors' application uses a Support Vector Machine to classify abnormal instances in the incoming sensor data. If found, the authors apply a periodically rebuilt, regressive prediction model to the abnormal instance and determine if the patient is entering a critical state or if a sensor is reporting faulty readings. Using real patient data in our experiments, the results validate the robustness of our proposed framework. The authors further discuss the experimental analysis with the proposed approach which shows that it is quickly able to identify sensor anomalies and compared with several other algorithms, it maintains a higher true positive and lower false negative rate.

Wireless Body Area Networks: A Survey

Recent developments and technological advancements in wireless communication, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and integrated circuits has enabled low-power, intelligent, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive micro and nano-technology sensor nodes strategically placed in or around the human body to be used in various applications, such as personal health monitoring. This exciting new area of research is called Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and leverages the emerging IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4j standards, specifically standardized for medical WBANs. The aim of WBANs is to simplify and improve speed, accuracy, and reliability of communication of sensors/actuators within, on, and in the immediate proximity of a human body. The vast scope of challenges associated with WBANs has led to numerous publications. In this paper, we survey the current state-of-art of WBANs based on the latest standards and publications. Open issues and challenges within each area are also explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments in WBANs.

Microwave Characterization of Carbon Nanotube Yarns For UWB Medical Wireless Body Area Networks

Carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns are novel CNT-based materials that extend the advantages of CNT from the nanoscale to macroscale applications. In this study, we have modeled CNT yarns as potential data transmission lines. Test structures have been designed to measure electrical properties of CNT yarns, which are attached to these test structures using gold paste. DC testing and microwave S-parameter measurements have been conducted for characterization. The observed frequency independent resistive behavior of the CNT yarn is a very promising indicator that this material, with its added values of mechanical resilience and thermal conductivity, could be invaluable for a range of applications such as body area networks. A model is developed for the CNT yarn, which fits the measured data collected and agrees in general with similar data for non-yarn CNTs.