Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks Research Articles

Reinforcement Learning (RL)-Based Energy Efficient Resource Allocation for Energy Harvesting-Powered Wireless Body Area Network.

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have attracted great attention from both industry and academia as a promising technology for continuous monitoring of physiological signals of the human body. As the sensors in WBANs are typically battery-driven and inconvenient to recharge, an energy efficient resource allocation scheme is essential to prolong the lifetime of the networks, while guaranteeing the rigid requirements of quality of service (QoS) of the WBANs in nature. As a possible alternative solution to address the energy efficiency problem, energy harvesting (EH) technology with the capability of harvesting energy from ambient sources can potentially reduce the dependence on the battery supply. Consequently, in this paper, we investigate the resource allocation problem for EH-powered WBANs (EH-WBANs). Our goal is to maximize the energy efficiency of the EH-WBANs with the joint consideration of transmission mode, relay selection, allocated time slot, transmission power, and the energy constraint of each sensor. In view of the characteristic of the EH-WBANs, we formulate the energy efficiency problem as a discrete-time and finite-state Markov decision process (DFMDP), in which allocation strategy decisions are made by a hub that does not have complete and global network information. Owing to the complexity of the problem, we propose a modified Q-learning (QL) algorithm to obtain the optimal allocation strategy. The numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme as well as the low computation complexity of the proposed modified Q-learning (QL) algorithm.

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 Survey on LPWAN Technologies in WBAN for Remote Health-Care Monitoring.

In ubiquitous health-care monitoring (HCM), wireless body area networks (WBANs) are envisioned as appealing solutions that may offer reliable methods for real-time monitoring of patients’ health conditions by employing the emerging communication technologies. This paper therefore focuses more on the state-of-the-art wireless communication systems that can be explored in the next-generation WBAN solutions for HCM. Also, this study addressed the critical issues confronted by the existing WBANs that are employed in HCM. Examples of such issues include wide-range health data communication constraint, health data delivery reliability concern, and energy efficiency, which are attributed to the limitations of the legacy short range, medium range, and the cellular technologies that are typically employed in WBAN systems. Since the WBAN sensor devices are usually configured with a finite battery power, they often get drained during prolonged operations. This phenomenon is technically exacerbated by the fact that the legacy communication systems, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, and so on, consume more energy during data communications. This unfortunate situation offers a scope for employing suitable communication systems identified in this study to improve the productivity of WBANs in HCM. For this to be achieved, the emerging communication systems such as the low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are investigated in this study based on their power transmission, data transmission rate, data reliability in the context of efficient data delivery, communication coverage, and latency, including their advantages, as well as disadvantages. As a consequence, the LPWAN solutions are presented for WBAN systems in remote HCM. Furthermore, this research work also points out future directions for the realization of the next-generation of WBANs, as well as how to improve the identified communication systems, to further enhance their productivity in WBAN solutions for HCM.

A New Asymmetrical Encryption Algorithm Based on Semitensor Compressed Sensing in WBANs

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are applied to monitor patients remotely. The sensors in WBANs have the characteristics of limited computing and less memory, while requiring real-time and security communications between sensors. In order to deal with the above problems, this article proposes a new asymmetric cryptographic algorithm (Diffie–Hellman–Hash-compression, abbreviated as DHS-C), which is based on the matrix decomposition. The asymmetric cryptographic algorithm can effectively solve the robustness problem in WBANs. The implementation of semitensor-compressed sensing can encrypt multiple signals with different dimensions and reduce the amount of transmission. In addition, the hash function, Arnold scrambling, and chaotic scrambling are applied to improve the security of our algorithm. A series of simulation and security analysis, including key space, pixel distribution of the encrypted image, adjacent pixel correlation, required storage space, compression ratio, peak-signal-to-noise ratio, and so on, are given to show the better performance of our proposed scheme.

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.

Constrained error rate analysis for wireless body area networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) is composed of miniaturised sensors that operate in the vicinity of the human body for recording the vital physiological signals and wirelessly transmitting them to a central hub for further processing. In this study, a statistical approach is applied to an experimental channel data set to extract the models for the squared channel gain that best describe the characteristics of the transmission medium between the sensors and the central hub. The derived models are then utilised to investigate the error rate performance of WBAN sensors. On the basis thereof, an optimisation problem is formed for which the cost function is the symbol error rate (SER) metric. The constraints to be appended to the problem reflect the fact that the communication among the nodes is envisaged to be long-lasting and harmless to the human tissues. Depending on the way that the constraints are combined, four possible problems are defined. Subsequently, the method of Lagrange multipliers is deployed to find the closed-form expression for the optimal energy allocation that results in error rate minimisation. The numerical results cast light on the capabilities of the devised analytical framework and the insight that it provides into a WBAN operation.

Priority Based Data Transmission for WBAN

<span>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.</span>

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.

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.

Priority Schemes for Life Extension and Data Delivery in Body Area Wireless Sensor Networks with Cognitive Radio Capabilities

Wireless sensor networks have recently been used to monitor bioelectric signals generated by the human body. However, since the dimensions and capabilities of the network nodes are small and limited, a problem is generated inherently by the energy consumption and radioelectric interference. In view of this, we propose two priority schemes to improve the performance of the network. In the first one, we aim at increasing the system lifetime by reducing the number of transmissions of nodes with low energy levels. In the second scheme, we aim at conveying priority data to the sink node as fast and efficient as possible. In the former scheme, users can be monitored for long time periods considering a low data generation. On the other hand, the latter scheme allows expediting transmission of important data when energy efficiency is not relevant. In this article, we mathematically model, analyze, and study the performance of the system for both priority schemes considering cognitive radio capabilities to make efficient use of resources and limit the radioelectric interference when the network transmits both continuous monitoring and event detection information. Numerical results provided in this work allow a careful parameter selection for practical implementation of BANETs.

Cloud-Based Wireless Body Area Networks: Managing Data for Better Health Care

Patients with chronic diseases and the elderly will benefit greatly from a close-monitoring healthcare system. A wireless body area network (WBAN) has been widely deployed for this purpose. WBAN sensors collect vast amounts of biosignal data from a patient for long periods of time. These biosignal data need to be efficiently managed and stored for further processing and future reference. This article reviews and compares the frameworks and also evaluates the various methods used to manage WBAN data. We aim to identify the best method of managing WBAN data and present an enhanced architectural platform. It is intended to help researchers and practitioners to further study, modify, and develop quality-of-service (QoS)-based WBAN health-care systems.

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

Vehicular Alarm System Using mHealth Data and Lightweight Security Algorithms

Among the various factors affecting long distance driving are the risks imposed by a driver’s health, which could result in road accidents. Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile health (mHealth) technologies are increasingly being recognized for their role in monitoring various health parameters of such drivers. IoT devices such as wearable devices could be used efficiently in vehicles by professional long-distance drivers. However, the adoption of such technologies is limited by security and privacy issues. This paper proposes a novel vehicular alarm notification system by integrating mHealth data of the driver with vehicular data for improving vehicle safety. The purpose of the system is to minimize road accidents by integrating the emerging mHealth technologies with the vehicular information system (VIS) using wireless body area network sensors and devices in a secure and lightweight framework. An integrated secure system could facilitate adoptability to provide timely notifications of emergencies to drivers in order to avoid road accidents and take appropriate follow-up actions. Furthermore, the information gathered by the integrated system could assist health service providers to address the driver’s root cause of potential health risks. The lightweight security framework adopted in this study is based on an efficient trust model that can improve the adoption of an mHealth integrated vehicular alarm notification system. Our contribution is to provide a real-time alarm notification service to avoid potential traffic accidents by monitoring the health status of long-distance drivers, achieved through incorporating an affordable and lightweight security system to secure health data transfer.

Secure and efficient data delivery for fog-assisted wireless body area networks

The growth of remote patient monitoring technology introduces new opportunities for improving patient outcomes, and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are a key piece in building a successful system. However, due to the limited power and computational resources of WBAN sensor nodes, combined with user mobility and large network coverage areas, integrating WBANs with cloud and fog computing presents one of the most viable options for successful remote monitoring. In order to help maintain the real-time operations of a fog-assisted WBAN, we propose a secure and efficient data delivery protocol that will reduce delay and protect against malicious attacks on the wireless signal. The protocol is composed of three custom algorithms that address channel assignment, gateway association, and introduce a new delay- and energy-aware routing metric. The channel assignment algorithm is designed to minimize and avoid interference, including jamming nodes. The fog gateway association algorithm helps to improve the efficiency and security of the connection between the WBAN and the remote resources. Similarly, the proposed routing metric is used to construct routes that both minimize delay and conserve power at the nodes along the path for improved efficiency and lifespan of the network. The system was simulated and tested under a variety of conditions to evaluate its performance in regards to mutual interference, human mobility, fog density, and attacks by jamming nodes. The results showed clear improvements in the efficiency and resiliency of the fog-assisted WBAN system when utilizing our protocol.

Secure Authentication and Group Key Distribution Scheme for WBANs Based on Smartphone ECG Sensor

As one of the crucial components in the emerging internet of things (IoT), wireless body area networks (WBANs) is capable of monitoring vital physiological and behavioral information of users through wearable sensors, offering a new paradigm for the next-generation healthcare systems. However, due to the inherent open wireless communicating characteristics, security and privacy issues for WBANs communication remain unsolved. Note that the deployed WBANs sensors are resource-restrained entities, which restricts its wide applications in medical environment. In this case, effective authentication scheme with efficient group key management strategy is of great significance. Moreover, with comparatively large computation ability and storage capacity, smartphone is able to perform as the vital data processing gateway for WBANs, especially in the upcoming 5G network implementation with superior transmission quality and speed. Furthermore, the WBAN sensors are responsible for continuous physiological monitoring, where the acquired biometric features could be adopted to the authentication process. For the above consideration, a secure certificateless biometric authentication and group key management for WBAN scenarios is proposed in this paper. In our design, user's smartphone takes the role of personal controller (PC) in traditional WBANs structure. The representative features of the gathered electrocardiogram (ECG) records are applied as the distinctive biometric parameter during authentication procedure. Hence efficient authentication towards participating sensors is enabled. Subsequently, fast group key management among all validated sensors is presented, where small modification is required for dynamic key updating mechanism in sensor side. Security analysis indicates that the proposed protocol can achieve desired security properties and provide resistance to various attacks. Performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with the state-of-the-art WBAN authentication schemes.

Joint Power-Rate-Slot Resource Allocation in Energy Harvesting-Powered Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area network (WBAN) has become a promising network for continuous health monitoring of various diseases. The limited energy of sensors in WBAN cannot support the long-term work with the high requirements of Quality of Service (QoS) for health applications. Energy harvesting (EH)-powered WBAN, which can provide uninterrupted work, has attracted more attention from both academic and industry. However, the time-varying and heterogeneous EH states of different sensors become an important factor when designing the resource allocation schemes in EH-powered WBAN. In this paper, we propose a novel two-phase resource allocation scheme, which optimizes the allocation of the transmission power, the source rate and the time slots to improve the QoS performances of EH-powered WBAN. In the first phase, we investigate that the statistical knowledge of energy harvesting to measure the long-term QoS performances, and then a joint power-rate control scheme is proposed to optimize the transmission power and the source rate for ensuring the long-term QoS performance. Moreover, we design a QoS aware slot allocation scheme to dynamically adjust the time slot allocation to cope with the time-varying and heterogeneous EH states for obtaining better short-term QoS performances in the second phase. Finally, numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint power-rate-slot resource allocation scheme of EH-powered WBANs can efficiently exploit the time-varying EH to improve both the long-term and short-term QoS performances.

A Secure and Efficient Group Key Management Protocol with Cooperative Sensor Association in WBANs.

The wireless body area network (WBAN) is considered as one of the emerging wireless techniques in the healthcare system. Typical WBAN sensors, especially implantable sensors, have limited power capability, which restricts their wide applications in the medical environment. In addition, it is necessary for the healthcare center (HC) to broadcast significant notifications to different patient groups. Considering the above issues, in this paper, the novel practical WBAN system model with group message broadcasting is built. Subsequently, a secure and efficient group key management protocol with cooperative sensor association is proposed. In the proposed protocol, the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) is employed for group key management between HC and the personal controller (PC), which also supports batch key updating. The proposed sensor association scheme is motivated by coded cooperative data exchange (CCDE). The formal security proofs are presented, indicating that the proposed protocol can achieve the desired security properties. Moreover, performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with state-of-the-art group key management protocols.

Real-Time Remote Health Monitoring Systems Using Body Sensor Information and Finger Vein Biometric Verification: A Multi-Layer Systematic Review.

The development of wireless body area sensor networks is imperative for modern telemedicine. However, attackers and cybercriminals are gradually becoming aware in attacking telemedicine systems, and the black market value of protected health information has the highest price nowadays. Security remains a formidable challenge to be resolved. Intelligent home environments make up one of the major application areas of pervasive computing. Security and privacy are the two most important issues in the remote monitoring and control of intelligent home environments for clients and servers in telemedicine architecture. The personal authentication approach that uses the finger vein pattern is a newly investigated biometric technique. This type of biometric has many advantages over other types (explained in detail later on) and is suitable for different human categories and ages. This study aims to establish a secure verification method for real-time monitoring systems to be used for the authentication of patients and other members who are working in telemedicine systems. The process begins with the sensor based on Tiers 1 and 2 (client side) in the telemedicine architecture and ends with patient verification in Tier 3 (server side) via finger vein biometric technology to ensure patient security on both sides. Multilayer taxonomy is conducted in this research to attain the study's goal. In the first layer, real-time remote monitoring studies based on the sensor technology used in telemedicine applications are reviewed and analysed to provide researchers a clear vision of security and privacy based on sensors in telemedicine. An extensive search is conducted to identify articles that deal with security and privacy issues, related applications are reviewed comprehensively and a coherent taxonomy of these articles is established. ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore and Web of Science databases are checked for articles on mHealth in telemedicine based on sensors. A total of 3064 papers are collected from 2007 to 2017. The retrieved articles are filtered according to the security and privacy of telemedicine applications based on sensors. Nineteen articles are selected and classified into two categories. The first category, which accounts for 57.89% (n = 11/19), includes surveys on telemedicine articles and their applications. The second category, accounting for 42.1% (n = 8/19), includes articles on the three-tiered architecture of telemedicine. The collected studies reveal the essential need to construct another taxonomy layer and review studies on finger vein biometric verification systems. This map-matching for both taxonomies is developed for this study to go deeply into the sensor field and determine novel risks and benefits for patient security and privacy on client and server sides in telemedicine applications. In the second layer of our taxonomy, the literature on finger vein biometric verification systems is analysed and reviewed. In this layer, we obtain a final set of 65 articles classified into four categories. In the first category, 80% (n = 52/65) of the articles focus on development and design. In the second category, 12.30% (n = 8/65) includes evaluation and comparative articles. These articles are not intensively included in our literature analysis. In the third category, 4.61% (n = 3/65) includes articles about analytical studies. In the fourth category, 3.07% (n = 2/65) comprises reviews and surveys. This study aims to provide researchers with an up-to-date overview of studies that have been conducted on (user/patient) authentication to enhance the security level in telemedicine or any information system. In the current study, taxonomy is presented by explaining previous studies. Moreover, this review highlights the motivations, challenges and recommendations related to finger vein biometric verification systems and determines the gaps in this research direction (protection of finger vein templates in real time), which represent a new research direction in this area.