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

Internet of Things (IoT) consists of smart devices that communicate with each other. It enables these devices to collect and exchange data. Besides, IoT has now a wide range of life applications such as industry, transportation, logistics, healthcare, smart environment, as well as personal, social gaming robot, and city information. Smart devices can have wired or wireless connection. As far as the wireless IoT is the main concern, many different wireless communication technologies and protocols can be used to connect the smart device such as Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), ZigBee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Z-Wave and Near Field Communication (NFC). They are short range standard network protocols, while SigFox and Cellular are Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN).standard protocols. This paper will be an attempt to review different communication protocols in IoT. In addition, it will compare between commonly IoT communication protocols, with an emphasis on the main features and behaviors of various metrics of power consumption security spreading data rate, and other features. This comparison aims at presenting guidelines for the researchers to be able to select the right protocol for different applications.

Internet of Things (IoT) communication protocols: Review

Current progress in wearable and implanted health monitoring technologies has strong potential to alter the future of healthcare services by enabling ubiquitous monitoring of patients. A typical health monitoring system consists of a network of wearable or implanted sensors that constantly monitor physiological parameters. Collected data are relayed using existing wireless communication protocols to a base station for additional processing. This article provides researchers with information to compare the existing low-power communication technologies that can potentially support the rapid development and deployment of WBAN systems, and mainly focuses on remote monitoring of elderly or chronically ill patients in residential environments.

A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

In IoT-based healthcare, medical devices are more vulnerable to numerous security threats and attacks than other network devices Current solutions are able to provide protection to patients' data during data transmission to some extent, but cannot prevent some sophisticated threats and attacks such as collusion attacks and data leakage In this article, we first investigate the challenges with privacy protected data collection Then we propose a practical framework called PrivacyProtector, patient privacy protected data collection, with the objective of preventing these types of attacks PrivacyProtector includes the ideas of secret sharing and share repairing (in case of data loss or compromise) for patients' data privacy Since it is the first time, we apply the Slepian- Wolf-coding-based secret sharing (SW-SSS) in PrivacyProtector In the framework, we use a distributed database consisting of multiple cloud servers, which ensures that the privacy of patients' personal data can remain protected as long as one of the servers remains uncompromised We also present a patient access control scheme in which multiple cloud servers collaborate in shared construction to offer patients' data to healthcare providers without revealing the content of the data The privacy performance analysis has shown that the PrivacyProtector framework is secure and privacy-protected against various attacks

PrivacyProtector: Privacy-Protected Patient Data Collection in IoT-Based Healthcare Systems

There are tremendous security concerns with patient health monitoring sensors in Internet of Things (IoT). The concerns are also realized by recent sophisticated security and privacy attacks, including data breaching, data integrity, and data collusion. Conventional solutions often offer security to patients’ health monitoring data during the communication. However, they often fail to deal with complicated attacks at the time of data conversion into cipher and after the cipher transmission. In this paper, we first study privacy and security concerns with healthcare data acquisition and then transmission. Then, we propose a secure data collection scheme for IoT-based healthcare system named SecureData with the aim to tackle security concerns similar to the above. SecureData scheme is composed of four layers: 1) IoT network sensors/devices; 2) Fog layers; 3) cloud computing layer; and 4) healthcare provider layer. We mainly contribute to the first three layers. For the first two layers, SecureData includes two techniques: 1) light-weight field programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware-based cipher algorithm and 2) secret cipher share algorithm. We study KATAN algorithm and we implement and optimize it on the FPGA hardware platform, while we use the idea of secret cipher sharing technique to protect patients’ data privacy. At the cloud computing layer, we apply a distributed database technique that includes a number of cloud data servers to guarantee patients’ personal data privacy at the cloud computing layer. The performance of SecureData is validated through simulations with FPGA in terms of hardware frequency rate, energy cost, and computation time of all the algorithms and the results show that SecureData can be efficient when applying for protecting security risks in IoT-based healthcare.

Secured Data Collection With Hardware-Based Ciphers for IoT-Based Healthcare

Information exchange has experienced a paradigm shift due to the appearance of wireless transport technologies. A wide variety of technologies have been proposed recently with different characteristics for diverse application environments. Such emerging technologies can be applied - depending on their specific features - to different e-health use cases. Additionally, some of those technologies have already adopted a path to medical device interoperability, while others are on their way to enable that potential. Hence the need to perform an overview of such technologies, which can be useful when designing interoperable, wireless-enabled e-health solutions. This article therefore reviews the emerging technologies that can be incorporated into the complex e-health information communication ecosystem and details the transport technologies that have adopted a specialized medical profile for ISO/IEEE 11073 interoperability such as USB, Bluetooth, and ZigBee. Discussion is focused on the expected path of novel emerging technologies toward ISO/IEEE 11073-compliant medical device interoperability. As a result, this article provides an up-to-date guideline for designers of standard-compliant wireless-enabled e-health architectures, helping in the selection of the appropriate technology for their designs.

Trends and challenges of the emerging technologies toward interoperability and standardization in e-health communications

Recent advances in consumer networking and emerging technologies are promoting a paradigm shift in the way environments such as entertainment, home automation or e-Health are traditionally understood. However, available technologies present different characteristics depending on the environment or the working domain that, in a context of non-experienced users, hinders the development of interoperable services. This article compares the most recent technological proposals and analyzes their key points, and presents a compilation of the major interoperability proposals and initiatives for the considered communication domains. The work is completed with a reasoned discussion on trends on architectural approaches to cross-domain integration that can be used to overcome the issues generated by the segmented ecosystems presented above.

Trends in entertainment, home automation and e-health: Toward cross-domain integration

The new paradigm of e-Health demands open sensors and middleware components that permit transparent integration and end-to-end interoperability of new personal health devices. The use of standards seems to be the internationally adopted way to solve these problems. This paper presents the implementation of an end-to-end standards-based e-Health solution. This includes ISO/IEEE11073 standard for the interoperability of the medical devices in the patient environment and EN13606 standard for the interoperable exchange of the Electronic Healthcare Record. The design strictly fulfills all the technical features of the most recent versions of both standards. The implemented prototype has been tested in a laboratory environment to demonstrate its feasibility for its further transfer to the healthcare system.

P. del Valle

Papers

Trends and challenges of the emerging technologies toward interoperability and standardization in e-health communications

Trends in entertainment, home automation and e-health: Toward cross-domain integration

Interoperable and standard e-Health solution over Bluetooth