Wireless sensor networks for healthcare: A survey

The increasing use of wireless networks and the constant miniaturization of electrical devices has empowered the development of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). In these networks various sensors are attached on clothing or on the body or even implanted under the skin. The wireless nature of the network and the wide variety of sensors offer numerous new, practical and innovative applications to improve health care and the Quality of Life. The sensors of a WBAN measure for example the heartbeat, the body temperature or record a prolonged electrocardiogram. Using a WBAN, the patient experiences a greater physical mobility and is no longer compelled to stay in the hospital. This paper offers a survey of the concept of Wireless Body Area Networks. First, we focus on some applications with special interest in patient monitoring. Then the communication in a WBAN and its positioning between the different technologies is discussed. An overview of the current research on the physical layer, existing MAC and network protocols is given. Further, cross layer and quality of service is discussed. As WBANs are placed on the human body and often transport private data, security is also considered. An overview of current and past projects is given. Finally, the open research issues and challenges are pointed out.

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A survey on wireless body area networks

Interest in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has increased significantly in recent years thanks to the advances in microelectronics and wireless communications. Owing to the very stringent application requirements in terms of reliability, energy efficiency, and low device complexity, the design of these networks requires the definition of new protocols with respect to those used in general purpose wireless sensor networks. This motivates the effort in research activities and in standardisation process of the last years. This survey paper aims at reporting an overview of WBAN main applications, technologies and standards, issues in WBANs design, and evolutions. Some case studies are reported, based on both real implementation and experimentation on the field, and on simulations. These results have the aim of providing useful insights for WBAN designers and of highlighting the main issues affecting the performance of these kind of networks.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks: Technologies and Design Challenges

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a leading solution in many important applications such as intrusion detection, target tracking, industrial automation, smart building and so on. Typically, a WSN consists of a large number of small, low-cost sensor nodes that are distributed in the target area for collecting data of interest. For a WSN to provide high throughput in an energy-efficient way, designing an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is of paramount importance because the MAC layer coordinates nodes' access to the shared wireless medium. To show the evolution of WSN MAC protocols, this article surveys the latest progresses in WSN MAC protocol designs over the period 2002-2011. In the early development stages, designers were mostly concerned with energy efficiency because sensor nodes are usually limited in power supply. Recently, new protocols are being developed to provide multi-task support and efficient delivery of bursty traffic. Therefore, research attention has turned back to throughput and delay. This article details the evolution of WSN MAC protocols in four categories: asynchronous, synchronous, frame-slotted, and multichannel. These designs are evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, data delivery performance, and overhead needed to maintain a protocol's mechanisms. With extensive analysis of the protocols many future directions are stated at the end of this survey. The performance of different classes of protocols could be substantially improved in future designs by taking into consideration the recent advances in technologies and application demands.

The Evolution of MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Healthcare applications are considered as promising fields for wireless sensor networks, where patients can be monitored using wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Current WMSN healthcare research trends focus on patient reliable communication, patient mobility, and energy-efficient routing, as a few examples. However, deploying new technologies in healthcare applications without considering security makes patient privacy vulnerable. Moreover, the physiological data of an individual are highly sensitive. Therefore, security is a paramount requirement of healthcare applications, especially in the case of patient privacy, if the patient has an embarrassing disease. This paper discusses the security and privacy issues in healthcare application using WMSNs. We highlight some popular healthcare projects using wireless medical sensor networks, and discuss their security. Our aim is to instigate discussion on these critical issues since the success of healthcare application depends directly on patient security and privacy, for ethic as well as legal reasons. In addition, we discuss the issues with existing security mechanisms, and sketch out the important security requirements for such applications. In addition, the paper reviews existing schemes that have been recently proposed to provide security solutions in wireless healthcare scenarios. Finally, the paper ends up with a summary of open security research issues that need to be explored for future healthcare applications using WMSNs.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/12/1/55/pdf

Security Issues in Healthcare Applications Using Wireless Medical Sensor Networks: A Survey

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient MAC Protocol designed specifically for wireless body area sensor networks (WBASN) focused towards pervasive healthcare applications. Wireless body area networks consist of wireless sensor nodes attached to the human body to monitor vital signs such as body temperature, activity or heart-rate. The network adopts a master-slave architecture, where the body-worn slave node periodically sends sensor readings to a central master node. Unlike traditional peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks, the nodes in this biomedical WBASN are not deployed in an ad hoc fashion. Joining a network is centrally managed and all communications are single-hop. To reduce energy consumption, all the sensor nodes are in standby or sleep mode until the centrally assigned time slot. Once a node has joined a network, there is no possibility of collision within a cluster as all communication is initiated by the central node and is addressed uniquely to a slave node. To avoid collisions with nearby transmitters, a clear channel assessment algorithm based on standard listen-before-transmit (LBT) is used. To handle time slot overlaps, the novel concept of a wakeup fallback time is introduced. Using single-hop communication and centrally controlled sleep/wakeup times leads to significant energy reductions for this application compared to more ldquoflexiblerdquo network MAC protocols such as 802.11 or Zigbee. As duty cycle is reduced, the overall power consumption approaches the standby power. The protocol is implemented in hardware as part of the Sensiumtrade system-on-chip WBASN ASIC, in a 0.13- mum CMOS process.

A.J. Burdett

Papers

Energy Efficient Medium Access Protocol for Wireless Medical Body Area Sensor Networks