International Journal of E-health and Medical Communications 

About: International Journal of E-health and Medical Communications is an academic journal published by IGI Global. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Health care & Computer science. It has an ISSN identifier of 1947-315X. Over the lifetime, 298 publications have been published receiving 2351 citations. The journal is also known as: IJEHMC.

Development of Audio Sensing Technology for Ambient Assisted Living: Applications and Challenges

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges in Ambient Assisted Living is to design health smart homes that anticipate the needs of its inhabitant while maintaining their safety and comfort. It is thus essential to ease the interaction with the smart home through systems that naturally react to voice command using microphones rather than tactile interfaces. However, efficient audio analysis in such noisy environment is a challenging task. In this paper, a real-time audio analysis system, the AuditHIS system, devoted to audio analysis in smart home environment is presented. AuditHIS has been tested thought three experiments carried out in a smart home that are detailed. The results show the difficulty of the task and serve as basis to discuss the stakes and the challenges of this promising technology in the domain of AAL.

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

Abstract: 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.

A Comprehensive Overview of Wireless Body Area Networks WBAN

Abstract: In recent years, the wireless body area network WBAN has emerged as a new technology for e-healthcare applications. The WBANs promise to revolutionize health monitoring. However, this technology remains in the first stages and much research is underway. Designers of such systems face a number of challenging tasks, as they need to address conflicting requirements. This includes managing the network, the data, while maximizing the autonomy of each network node. Reducing the consumption of a node, the management of network resources and security insurance are therefore major challenges. This paper presents a survey of body area networks including the WBANs challenges and -architecture, the most important body sensor devices, as well as sensor board hardware and platforms. Further, various applications of WBANs in the medical field are discussed, as well as wireless communications standards and technologies. The newest researches related to WBANs at physical and MAC layers are presented. Finally the paper identifies data security and privacy in WBANs as well as open research issues.

A Survey of Routing Protocols in Wireless Body Area Networks for Healthcare Applications

Abstract: Recent advances in electronics and integrated circuits have fostered the development of small and intelligent medical sensors and actuators that are wearable or implementable inside the human body. The main function of these devices is to collect patient's physiological parameters and forward them to the medical center in an efficient and reliable way. Therefore, routing is a non-trivial task in wireless body area networks WBAN; sensing the importance of routing in WBAN and the availability of a significant body of literature on this topic are the main motivations that encourage the study and examination of routing mechanisms. This paper proposes WBAN routing approaches. It outlines the design challenges for WBAN routing protocols and sketches out the communication architecture of this type of network. The authors' main contribution is the classification of the routing techniques into six main categories, which corresponds to thermal aware routing protocols, cluster based routing protocols, cross layers based routing protocols, quality of service QoS aware routing protocols, and delay tolerant aware routing protocols. The advantages and performance issues of each routing technique are highlighted. This paper is useful for researchers to make enhancements to the future design of WBAN routing protocols and algorithms.

Simulating Light-Weight-Cryptography Implementation for IoT Healthcare Data Security Applications

Abstract: Short period monitoring and emergency notification of healthcare signals is becoming affordable with existence of internet of things (IoT) support. However, IoT does not prevent challenges that may hinder the appropriate safe spread of medical solutions. Confidentiality of data is vital, making a real fear requesting cryptography. The limitations in memory, computations processing, power consumptions, and small-size devices contradict the robust encryption process asking for help of low-weight-cryptography to handle practically. This article presents a comparative analysis of performance evaluation of three trusted candidate encryption algorithms, namely AES, SPECK and SIMON, which are simulated and compared in details to distinguish who has the best behaviour to be nominated for a medical application. These encryption algorithms are implemented and evaluated in regard to the execution time, power consumption, memory occupation and speed. The implementation is carried out using the Cooja simulator running on Contiki operating system showing interesting attractive results.