Wireless Body Area Network for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring
Wireless Body Area Network for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring
  • Sana Ullah
  • 승인 2010.08.18 19:40
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Current healthcare systems are facing new challenges due to the rate of growth of the elderly population (age 65+) and limited financial resources. According to the US Bureau of the Census, the number of senior citizens (65-84) is predicted to double from 35 million to 70 million by 2025 [1]. This trend shows that the world elderly population will double from 375 million in 1990 to 761 million in 2025. Furthermore, overall healthcare expenditure in the US was $1.8 trillion in 2004, and this number is projected to triple by 2020, or 20% of the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) [2]-[3]. The impending health crisis attracts researchers, industrialists, and economists toward optimal and quick health solutions. The non-intrusive and ambulatory health monitoring of patient's vital signs with real time updates of medical records via the internet provides economical solutions to the challenges that health care systems face. The remote monitoring of body status and the surrounding environment is therefore becoming more important for sporting activities, members of emergency, military and health care services. The levels of fitness required for competitive international sporting events require athletes to be at the very pinnacle of fitness with every muscle used to its utmost. Furthermore, many body processes are traditionally monitored and separated by a considerable period of time. This can give an incomplete picture of what is really happening. Consider a patient visiting a doctor for a blood pressure check; he/she may be anxious and thus have elevated pressure resulting in an inaccurate diagnosis. If, however, the patient can be fitted with a simple monitoring system that requires no intervention, then a picture can be built up of how the pressure changes throughout the day when he/she goes under normal conditions. This gives a better picture of what is happening and removes inaccurate results caused by a visit to the doctor. To achieve these requirements, monitoring of movement and body processes are essential. This monitoring requires the sensors and wireless system to be lightweight and integrated unobtrusively into clothing.

 

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) allows the integration of intelligent, miniaturized, low-power sensor nodes in, on, or around a human body to monitor body functions and the surrounding environment. Each intelligent node has enough capability to process and forward information to a base station for diagnosis and prescription. A WBAN provides long term health monitoring of patients under natural physiological states without constraining their normal activities. It can be used to develop a smart and affordable health care system and can be a part of diagnostic procedure, maintenance of chronic conditions, supervised recovery from a surgical procedure and can handle emergency events [4]. Figure 1 shows the WBAN architecture for ubiquitous health monitoring where the WBAN traffic is classified into On-demand, Emergency, and Normal traffic. On-demand traffic is initiated by the coordinator or doctor to acquire certain information, mostly for the purpose of diagnostic recommendations. This is further divided into continuous (in case of surgical events) and discontinuous (when occasional information is required). Emergency traffic is initiated by the nodes when they exceed a predefined threshold and should be accommodated in less than one second. This kind of traffic is not generated at regular intervals and is totally unpredictable. Normal traffic is the data traffic under normal conditions with no time-critical and on-demand events. This includes unobtrusive and routine health monitoring of a patient and treatment of many diseases such as gastrointestinal tract, neurological disorders, cancer detection, handicap rehabilitation, and the most threatening: heart disease. The normal data is collected and processed by the coordinator. Depending on the application requirements, the coordinator may contain a wake-up radio circuit to accommodate life-critical events. The coordinator is further connected to telemedicine and medical servers for relevant recommendations. In a nut shell, the proper integration of WBAN in smart healthcare systems can not only prevent the occurrence of myocardial infarction and other life-threatening diseases but can also support a variety of non-medical applications including sporting and entertainment applications.

WBAN architecture for ubiquitous health monitoring

References

[1] Campbell. P., Current Population Reports (Population Projections: states, 1995-2025), Census Bureau, pp. 25-1131, 2005.

[2] July 2009, http://www.who.int/

[3] Barroso, A., Benson, J., et al., The DSYS25 sensor platform, In Proceedings of the ACM sensys 2004, Baltimore, November 2004.

[4] Jovanov, E., Milenkovic, A., Otto, C., de Groen, P.: A Wireless body area network of intelligent motion sensors for computer assisted physical rehabilitation,Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, Vol. 2 No.6, March 2005.

[5] Ullah, S., Khan, P., Ullah, N., Higgins, H., Saleem, S., Kwak, K.S., A review of WBANs for medical applications, International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences (IJCNS), Vol. 2, No. 8, pp. 797-803. 2009.

 


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