Wireless Body Area Network System Research Articles

All-Textile Compact Ultra-Wideband Microstrip Antenna with Full Ground Plane for WBAN Applications

A novel low-profile all-textile microstrip antenna for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications in wireless body area networks (WBANs) is presented. The antenna incorporates flexible materials such as felt and conductive fabrics which provide optimal wearing comfort and durability. The use of a single dielectric substrate layer facilitates the integration process. The antenna also features a full background plane that minimizes the back radiation towards the human body. Multiple branches are designed in a compact area to generate adjacent resonances, and their combination achieves broadband characteristics across the 4.83–9.57 GHz frequency band. The antenna has a miniaturized size of 60 mm × 60 mm, which is 1.6λg × 1.6λg (where λg represents the guided wavelength at the center frequency), and it has a high realized gain of up to 10 dBi. The fully grounded structure also ensures good isolation between the antenna and the human body, thereby alleviating concerns regarding safety and radiation degradation in WBAN context. Simulation results indicate that the antenna maintains high performance levels during various bending tests. Given its favourable properties like ultra-wide bandwidth, compact size, low profile, high flexibility, and low specific absorption rate (SAR), the proposed design could find broad application prospects in high-speed WBAN systems.

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) based Health Care Monitoring: A Comprehensive Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) based Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), play a very important role in the implementation of IoT devices. It is an upcoming research area in which we implement new advancement techniques, such as various algorithms. In this research, we explore how to secure IoT devices from cyber-attacks and also define how to handle the communication packets between IoT devices. Some IoT devices require more resources for communication so we define the techniques used to reduce these resources. The main purpose of this review is to provide a quick review of all techniques for novice researcher who wants to start their research in this domain. Now the universe is getting smaller due to a sharp growth in scientific and technological research. The development of communication technologies over the past few decades is remarkable. It has gotten harder for medical associates to take care of the patients by coming into the hospital and then personally checking them. The population of the world is increasing and the area is getting smaller. The development of wireless communication has provided a solution to these issues in the form of a remote health monitoring system. The WBAN in the domain of medicine provides the best way for patient monitoring inside or outside the hospital. Through WBAN, we can easily monitor the patient's state without visiting the hospital. WBAN is used in multiple areas such as energy-saving, eHealth monitoring systems to maintain the quality services of data, and many other areas. In this paper, we survey the current state of various aspects of WBAN technologies that are being used in healthcare applications, the targeted area is the eHealth monitoring system. Using multiple WBAN techniques, we aim to identify which techniques are giving better results in data transmission, storing, and maintaining patient data privacy and also identify the best performance using multiple techniques based on the two most important parameters such as ‘throughput’, and ‘delay’. These parameters estimate the overall performance of any WBAN system. We collected data from the last 15 years' papers. The major contribution of this paper is to identify the best technique in e-healthcare among all in terms of delay and throughput used in the past recent years.

Integration of Blockchain Technology for Security and Privacy Enhancement in Wireless Body Area Network Systems

Integration of Blockchain Technology for Security and Privacy Enhancement in Wireless Body Area Network Systems

Energy Efficient Priority-Based Hybrid MAC Protocol for IoT-Enabled WBAN Systems

Among the wireless body area network (WBAN) scarce resources, energy resource is an essential resource on which most of the WBAN biomedical devices activities depend upon. The biomedical devices are usually battery-powered and if they fail to operate as required because of battery power drain, the WBAN system would become unreliable, and this could lead to life-threatening situations. Consequently, it would be of advantage and logical to minimize energy consumption and energy wastage issues to achieve an energy efficient WBAN system. Following this, we proposed a coordinated superframe duty cycle hybrid MAC (SDC-HYMAC) protocol to enhance energy efficiency and to prolong the biomedical devices lifetime. To improve the energy efficiency of the WBAN system, we introduced different energy resource management strategies including the design of a priority-based slot-allocation scheme to minimize timeslot and energy wastage. Also, we proposed a coordinated superframe duty cycle (SDC) scheme to accurately select an appropriate superframe order (SO) based on the traffic information and the priority level of the biomedical devices to save energy and prolong the devices lifetime. We compared the SDC-HYMAC protocol with other related protocols like MG-HYMAC, HyMAC, and CPMAC for the sake of validation, and is simulated in MATLAB. The outcome of the simulation results revealed that the SDC-HYMAC protocol performed better than the existing protocols using performance metrics like convergence speed, energy efficiency, delay, packet drop ratio, and devices lifetime.

Intelligent Reconfigurable Surface enhanced Ambient Backscatter Communication enabled Wireless Body Area Network

This paper considers an Intelligent Reconfigurable Surface (IRS)-enhanced Ambient Backscatter Communication (AmBC)-enabled Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) system. We study the Base Station (BS) transmit power minimization problem, where the BS’s transmit beamforming vector and IRS’s reflecting coefficients are jointly optimized, subjected to the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) requirements of intra-WABN communication and throughput requirement of primary communication. To solve the non-convex problem, a near-optimal algorithm based on Semi-Definite Relaxation (SDR) and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA), and a low complexity algorithm based on IRS elements partition are proposed. Numerical results show that the two proposed algorithms considerably outperform the baseline schemes.

IoT-Enabled WBAN and Machine Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition in Patients

Internet of things (IoT)-enabled wireless body area network (WBAN) is an emerging technology that combines medical devices, wireless devices, and non-medical devices for healthcare management applications. Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an active research field in the healthcare domain and machine learning. It is a technique that can be used to automatically identify speakers' emotions from their speech. However, the SER system, especially in the healthcare domain, is confronted with a few challenges. For example, low prediction accuracy, high computational complexity, delay in real-time prediction, and how to identify appropriate features from speech. Motivated by these research gaps, we proposed an emotion-aware IoT-enabled WBAN system within the healthcare framework where data processing and long-range data transmissions are performed by an edge AI system for real-time prediction of patients' speech emotions as well as to capture the changes in emotions before and after treatment. Additionally, we investigated the effectiveness of different machine learning and deep learning algorithms in terms of performance classification, feature extraction methods, and normalization methods. We developed a hybrid deep learning model, i.e., convolutional neural network (CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), and a regularized CNN model. We combined the models with different optimization strategies and regularization techniques to improve the prediction accuracy, reduce generalization error, and reduce the computational complexity of the neural networks in terms of their computational time, power, and space. Different experiments were performed to check the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The proposed models are compared with a related existing model for evaluation and validation using standard performance metrics such as prediction accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, confusion matrix, and the differences between the actual and predicted values. The experimental results proved that one of the proposed models outperformed the existing model with an accuracy of about 98%.

Nano-Enriched Self-Powered Wireless Body Area Network for Sustainable Health Monitoring Services.

Advances in nanotechnology have enabled the creation of novel materials with specific electrical and physical characteristics. This leads to a significant development in the industry of electronics that can be applied in various fields. In this paper, we propose a fabrication of nanotechnology-based materials that can be used to design stretchy piezoelectric nanofibers for energy harvesting to power connected bio-nanosensors in a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The bio-nanosensors are powered based on harvested energy from mechanical movements of the body, specifically the arms, joints, and heartbeats. A suite of these nano-enriched bio-nanosensors can be used to form microgrids for a self-powered wireless body area network (SpWBAN), which can be used in various sustainable health monitoring services. A system model for an SpWBAN with an energy harvesting-based medium access control protocol is presented and analyzed based on fabricated nanofibers with specific characteristics. The simulation results show that the SpWBAN outperforms and has a longer lifetime than contemporary WBAN system designs without self-powering capability.

ECCPWS: An ECC-based protocol for WBAN systems

The development of Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and Wearable Health Monitoring Systems (WHMS) play a key role in healthcare monitoring. WBAN includes medical sensors that monitor vital signs of patients, collect data and usually transmit them to medical servers via wireless channels. Therefore, the patient’s sensitive information sent over the channel can be vulnerable to various attacks. Hence, designing lightweight authentication security protocols for these systems with the lowest computational and communication costs has become a major challenge. Recently, Sowjanya et al. (2020) presented a lightweight authentication scheme for WHMS based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which provides optimal security features and low storage, communication and computational costs. In this paper, the security of their scheme is evaluated and passive insider secret disclosure and replay attacks against their scheme are presented. It is obvious that other attacks such as desynchronization attack and impersonation attack can be applied to this protocol by obtaining the secret value of network manager. The complexity of our proposed attacks is just one run of the protocol and their success probability equals to one. Finally, by remedying the Sowjanya et al. (2020) ’s protocol, a lightweight ECC-based authentication scheme called ECCPWS is proposed. Moreover, the proposed protocol’s security proof is performed via informal methods and also formally through Real-Or-Random (ROR) model, BAN logic, Scyther and AVISPA tools. The security verification results of ECCPWS show that the ECCPWS has complete security against various security vulnerabilities and attacks.

Implementation and experimental evaluation of dynamic capabilities in wireless body area networks: different setting parameters and environments

It is well known that a wireless body area network (WBAN) is a special proposed wireless sensor network (WSN) that can assist in monitoring physiological signals for the evaluation and planning of patient treatment. One of the most challenging issues for WBANs is communication reliability, with acceptable communication efficiency and packet loss. To obtain such network characteristics, collision-free data transmission in networks of wireless sensor nodes is an interesting research problem. In this paper, the experiments of dynamic capabilities in several WBAN scenarios are focused, where the novelty and major contribution of our tests is that the effects of packet inter-arrival times, packet sizes, and the number of nodes deployed in the network, including human movements, indoor and outdoor environments, and transmitter and receiver positions, are all taken into consideration and evaluated. This is achieved by implementing the WBAN using IEEE 802.15.4 low-power sensor nodes. Experimental results illustrate the significant factors that impact the communication reliability of WBANs as measured by the packet delivery ratio (PDR). The experimental results show that the diverse environment testbed can affect network performance for WBAN data transmission. Our findings also show that the best network reliability needs to be set at more than 15 ms in packet interval time to achieve over 90% PDR for every test scenario. More details of the experimental results related to WBAN reliability obtained from all test cases are also discussed and summarized in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, our findings can be useful for users and researchers to consider the optimal point for WBAN setting and configuration to achieve the communication reliability requirements and also to deploy and develop a more reliable WBAN system.

An PPG signal and body channel based encryption method for WBANs

With the rapid development of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in recent years, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has become a hot topic in the scientific and industrial community, since it defines a novel network architecture for medical and healthcare circumstances in IoT and loMT. Considering that unauthorized data tampering and information leakage in WBAN may cause life-threatening issues, Data security is an important technical support to ensure the smooth implementation of WBAN. Due to the characteristics of the WBAN system, the traditional wireless communication data security method is not suitable for WBAN because of the high complexity and high cost. This paper adopts the Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal feature and the channel characteristic values from the WBAN system to calculate the base key, then generates the key sequence for data encryption of WBAN through Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR). Experimental results show that this data security method has the advantages of less resource consumption, low computational complexity, and dynamic key update.

A Review on Dynamic Buffer Traffic Condition Protocol in Telemedicine

Various MAC-protocol has been adopted over the years in Telemedicine, also known as Wireless Body Area Network system (WBANs), to enhance the proper transmission of the busy congestion of data message. However, these techniques could not coordinate traffic congestion in the receiver node, which could make the receiver nodes experience an "active mode" most of the time compared to the transmit node. This is dangerous to the network system because of uncontrollable energy usage. In this protocol, the intelligent sensor is strategically located around or implanted in the human body for the collection of human body physiological parameters. WBANs experienced some limitations such as latency and excessive consumption of energy which may hinder the lifetime maximization of the system if not taken care of properly. In this work, four elements are responsible for carrying-out only traffic data, and they are implemented by using the highest priority sensor nodes within a short period used for communicating to the Buffer Traffic Condition (BTC) discussed and the traffic measurement to mitigate active-mode interval in the receiving phase of the improved superframe structure of IEEE 802.15.6. Furthermore, meaningful information about the superframe to mitigate the busy traffic and enhance this protocol was also discussed as its possible functions with the help of an adaptive system. No article depicts the analysis of the work on the dynamic buffer traffic condition scheme, and this proposed scheme can improve on the existing one.

Dual-Factor WBAN Enhanced Authentication System Based on Iris and ECG Descriptors

At present, COVID-19 is still spreading and affecting millions of people worldwide. Minimizing the need for travel can significantly reduce the probability of infection and improve patients’ quality of life. The wireless body area network (WBAN) transmits the patients’ physiological data to the doctor remotely through the sensors in a way that minimizes physical contact with others. However, existing WBAN security authentication schemes have a core limitation that includes weak authentication performance and overconsumption of resources that precludes their widespread adoption in practical applications. Therefore, in this article, an enhanced dual-factor authentication system that addresses the mentioned drawbacks is proposed for securing WBAN resources. By combining iris and electrocardiogram (ECG) features, users would be required to pass the first-level iris authentication before performing the second-level ECG authentication, thus enhancing the overall security scheme of a WBAN system. Furthermore, we examined the existing inter-pulse-interval (IPI) encoding methods and propose a more efficient ECG IPI encoding algorithm, which can effectively shorten the encoding time without affecting the overall encoding performance. Finally, extensive experiments were performed to verify the performance of the proposed dual-factor iris and ECG-based WBAN authentication system using public iris and ECG databases. The experimental results show that the false acceptance rate (FAR) is close to 0.0%, and the false rejection rate (FRR) is close to 3.2%. Findings from this study suggest that the proposed dual-factor authentication scheme could aid the adequate deployment of security schemes to protect WBAN resources in practical applications.

Textile UWB Antennas for Biomedical Applications

In recent years, there has been an increase in worry about the security of Wireless Body Area Network systems, particularly worn electronics such as military, entertainment, and medical devices. The ability to communicate wirelessly from or to the body via conformal and wearable antennas is a major characteristic of modern wearable electronics. In this work, circular ring and fractal antennas are designed using a wearable substrate of denim with a dielectric constant of 1.7. Design and simulations are carried out in the CST Microwave environment and different performance characteristics of the antenna are examined in free space and on body medical applications.

An Efficient Revocable Identity-Based Encryption with Equality Test Scheme for the Wireless Body Area Network

With the rapid development and popularization of cloud computing, people are willing to upload their own data to the cloud to enjoy the services. However, some personal and private data are not suitable for uploading directly to the cloud. Therefore, these data must be encrypted before uploading to the cloud to ensure the confidentiality. To achieve the confidentiality of data and enjoy cloud services, a notion of identity-based encryption with equality test (IBEET) was proposed. Using IBEET, two ciphertexts encrypted under different public keys can be tested to confirm whether they contain the same plaintext. The equality test can be applied to the wireless body area network system in which the cloud can utilize ciphertexts from patients and medical institutions to perform equality tests to determine whether which patient’s status is abnormal. Indeed, revoking illegal or expired users on any cryptosystem is an important issue. To the best of our knowledge, there is little research on the design mechanism of user revocation in the IBEET. In this paper, we propose a novel notion of revocable identity-based encryption with an equality test, called RIBEET. Based on the notion, we present the first RIBEET scheme. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme will be proven to be secure under the bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) assumption.

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.

Practical Distributed Reception for Wireless Body Area Networks Using Supervised Learning

Medical applications have driven many areas of engineering to optimize diagnostic capabilities and convenience. In the near future, wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to have widespread impact in medicine. To achieve this impact, however, significant advances in research are needed to cope with the changes of the human body’s state, which make coherent communications difficult or even impossible. In this paper, we consider a realistic noncoherent WBAN system model where transmissions and receptions are conducted without any channel state information due to the fast-varying channels of the human body. Using distributed reception, we propose several symbol detection approaches where on-off keying (OOK) modulation is exploited, among which a supervised-learning-based approach is developed to overcome the noncoherent system issue. Through simulation results, we compare and verify the performance of the proposed techniques for noncoherent WBANs with OOK transmissions. We show that the well-defined detection techniques with a supervised-learning-based approach enable robust communications for noncoherent WBAN systems.

Energy Consumption Improvement of a Healthcare Monitoring System: Application to LoRaWAN

Recent advances in wireless communication technologies are having a great impact on people’s life, especially in the field of healthcare industry that provides a remote monitoring enabling medical staff to follow up the patient and diagnose his disease. LoRa wireless technology is becoming one of the most energetic effective solutions for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) communications. In this work, we propose a LoRa-based low power healthcare WBAN platform called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HeaLoRa</i> for an adaptive patient monitoring process. Physicians can remotely monitor patient’s temperature, oxygen saturation level, blood pressure and heart rate to prevent any abnormality. Moreover, data acquisition and transmission are controlled based on a power consumption optimization strategy aiming to reduce redundant data. Based on the Early Warning Score (EWS), the system configuration is dynamically adapted, using a Fuzzy logic controller that makes the decision about the system sleep mode duration and the sent data rate. Furthermore, an analytical model of the energy consumption for acknowledged LoRa transmission is presented in this paper. The graphical abstract of the paper illustrates a medical application of a wireless body area network system where LoRa technology is used to transmit the data to a gateway then the data is transmitted to the doctor using IP based technology. By comparing with a reference system, the simulation results indicate that our system consumes 3 to 10 times less of energy depending on the studied scenario.

Design and Evaluation of a Button Sensor Antenna for On-Body Monitoring Activity in Healthcare Applications.

A button sensor antenna for on-body monitoring in wireless body area network (WBAN) systems is presented. Due to the close coupling between the sensor antenna and the human body, it is highly challenging to design sensor antenna devices. In this paper, a mechanically robust system is proposed that integrates a dual-band button antenna with a wireless sensor module designed on a printed circuit board (PCB). The system features a small footprint and has good radiation characteristics and efficiency. This was fabricated, and the measured and simulated results are in good agreement. The design offers a wide range of omnidirectional radiation patterns in free space, with a reflection coefficient (S11) of dB, a maximum gain of dBi, and radiation efficiency of % in the lower and upper bands, respectively. S11 reaches dB and ) dB, respectively, with a gain of dBi and dBi, and radiation efficiency of and , when located on the body for the lower and upper bands, respectively. The performance is minimally affected by bending, movement, and fabrication tolerances. The specific absorption rate (SAR) values are below the regulatory limitations for the spatial average over 1 g (1.6 W/Kg) and 10 g of tissues (2.0 W/Kg). For both indoor and outdoor conditions, experimental results of the range tests confirm the coverage of up to 40 m.

Optimized Reception Sensitivity of WBAN Sensors Exploiting Network Coding and Modulation Techniques in an Advanced NB-IoT

The sensitivity of the maximum useable data is the most significant characteristic that describes the quality of the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) of Medical sensors (MS) receivers. It becomes the most important performance factor in mobile wireless communication networks, particularly wireless body area networks (WBAN). Our interest is in level sensitivity using modulation techniques and subcarrier spacing(SS) to achieve good Bit Error Rate (BER) performance, throughput, and power efficiencies for WBAN communication Systems in an advanced NB-IoT. We propose an efficient coding technique using Linear Network Coding (LNC) to improve sensitivity by considering several factors without affecting the human body. We also present an experimentally analyzed overview of the reception sensibility. Our research has revealed that the receiver sensitivity (minimum detectable signal level) and throughput of the proposed approach (PA) are much better than the conventional approach (CA), achieving more than 14.3% and 55%, respectively, compared to the CA. Also, the PA has improved the modulation types by approximately 45% to provide more throughput and reliability.

The Attenuation Characteristics of the Body Tissue on Frequency Function in WBAN Channel

The Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) refers to a communication network between sensors placed on the inside, on the surface, or around the body wirelessly. WBAN system cannot be separated from body tissues. Body tissues also have electrical properties depending on frequency. Therefore, body tissue can affect the phenomena occurring in radio wave propagation in the WBAN channel. One of the phenomena is attenuation. This study investigates the impacts of body tissue on the WBAN channel and the effects of frequency on the attenuation of body tissue in the WBAN channel. The measurement of magnitude response was carried out with the human body as the measurement object by utilizing the S21 parameter measurement with a vector network analyzer. In NLOS conditions, a human body was located between two coplanar Vivaldi antenna. Measurements were conducted on the head, chest, and abdomen. The frequency used was in the range of 2 GHz to 6 GHz. The body tissue attenuation was obtained by finding the difference between the magnitude measurement response on the LOS and NLOS conditions. The attenuation data were analyzed using statistical and numerical analysis to determine the effect of frequency on the attenuation of the human body tissues. Based on the analysis results, it was identified that the frequency affected the human body tissue attenuation. The enhancement attenuation of the human body tissues occurred when the frequency was higher. Moreover, there was a significant difference in the body tissue attenuation in different parts of the body.Keywords: attenuation, body tissues, s-parameters, wireless body area network.