Ubiquitous HealthCare in Wireless Body Area Networks - A Survey
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paper_title: Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges

paper_content:

Body Area Networks integrated into mHealth systems are becoming a mature technology with unprecedented opportunities for personalized health monitoring and management. Potential applications include early detection of abnormal conditions, supervised rehabilitation, and wellness management. Such integrated mHealth systems can provide patients with increased confidence and a better quality of life, and promote healthy behavior and health awareness. Automatic integration of collected information and user's inputs into research databases can provide medical community with opportunity to search for personalized trends and group patterns, allowing insights into disease evolution, the rehabilitation process, and the effects of drug therapy. A new generation of personalized monitoring systems will allow users to customize their systems and user interfaces and to interact with their social networks. With emergence of first commercial body area network systems, a number of system design issues are still to be resolved, such as seamless integration of information and ad-hoc interaction with ambient sensors and other networks, to enable their wider acceptance. In this paper we present state of technology, discuss promising new trends, opportunities and challenges of body area networks for ubiquitous health monitoring applications.
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paper_title: Ubiquitous Mobile Health Monitoring System for Elderly (UMHMSE)

paper_content:

Recent research in ubiquitous computing uses technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs) to monitor the person's kinematics and physiological parameters. In this paper we propose a real time mobile health system for monitoring elderly patients from indoor or outdoor environments. The system uses a bio- signal sensor worn by the patient and a Smartphone as a central node. The sensor data is collected and transmitted to the intelligent server through GPRS/UMTS to be analyzed. The prototype (UMHMSE) monitors the elderly mobility, location and vital signs such as Sp02 and Heart Rate. Remote users (family and medical personnel) might have a real time access to the collected information through a web application.
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paper_title: A Distributed Algorithm for Coverage Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

paper_content:

Lifetime management of sensors is defined as one of the most critical and vital concepts of targets coverage in all kinds of wireless sensor networks. One of the most popular methods in order to increase a network’s lifetime is dividing the sensors of that network into some temporary subsets in which each one could independently cover all the targets while they keep their connectivity with the sink node. Therefore a sensor network could easily use an activated subset of its sensors to cover its targets and let the other sensors sleep or stand by at the same time. Moreover, a network’s lifetime could be efficiently managed by controlling of its coverage circumstances. In this paper, an improved distributed algorithm is proposed for the problem of connected partial targets coverage. Our experimental results demonstrate that the lifetime of a wireless sensor network is highly increased while it uses the proposed method in this paper.
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paper_title: DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF NEW INTELLIGENT SENSOR PLACEMENT ALGORITHM TO IMPROVE COVERAGE PROBLEM IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

paper_content:

Adequate coverage is one of the main problems for Sensor Networks. The effectiveness of distributed wireless sensor networks highly depends on the sensor deployment scheme. Given a finite number of sensors, optimizing the sensor deployment will provide sufficient sensor coverage and save cost of sensors for locating in grid points. In many working environments, for achieving good coverage, we must able to placement of sensors in adequate places. In this article we apply the simulated annealing, genetic and learning automata as intelligent methods for solving the sensor placement in distributed sensor networks. In the distributed sensor networks, the sensor placement is a NP-complete problem for arbitrary sensor fields and it is one of the most important issues in the research fields, so the proposed algorithm is going to solve this problem by considering two factors: one is the complete coverage and the second one is the minimum cost. The proposed method is examined in different areas by C language. The results not only confirm the successes of using new method in sensor placement, also they show that the new method is more efficiently in large areas compared to other methods like PBIL.
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paper_title: Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges

paper_content:

Body Area Networks integrated into mHealth systems are becoming a mature technology with unprecedented opportunities for personalized health monitoring and management. Potential applications include early detection of abnormal conditions, supervised rehabilitation, and wellness management. Such integrated mHealth systems can provide patients with increased confidence and a better quality of life, and promote healthy behavior and health awareness. Automatic integration of collected information and user's inputs into research databases can provide medical community with opportunity to search for personalized trends and group patterns, allowing insights into disease evolution, the rehabilitation process, and the effects of drug therapy. A new generation of personalized monitoring systems will allow users to customize their systems and user interfaces and to interact with their social networks. With emergence of first commercial body area network systems, a number of system design issues are still to be resolved, such as seamless integration of information and ad-hoc interaction with ambient sensors and other networks, to enable their wider acceptance. In this paper we present state of technology, discuss promising new trends, opportunities and challenges of body area networks for ubiquitous health monitoring applications.
---
paper_title: Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges

paper_content:

Body Area Networks integrated into mHealth systems are becoming a mature technology with unprecedented opportunities for personalized health monitoring and management. Potential applications include early detection of abnormal conditions, supervised rehabilitation, and wellness management. Such integrated mHealth systems can provide patients with increased confidence and a better quality of life, and promote healthy behavior and health awareness. Automatic integration of collected information and user's inputs into research databases can provide medical community with opportunity to search for personalized trends and group patterns, allowing insights into disease evolution, the rehabilitation process, and the effects of drug therapy. A new generation of personalized monitoring systems will allow users to customize their systems and user interfaces and to interact with their social networks. With emergence of first commercial body area network systems, a number of system design issues are still to be resolved, such as seamless integration of information and ad-hoc interaction with ambient sensors and other networks, to enable their wider acceptance. In this paper we present state of technology, discuss promising new trends, opportunities and challenges of body area networks for ubiquitous health monitoring applications.
---
paper_title: Ubiquitous Mobile Health Monitoring System for Elderly (UMHMSE)

paper_content:

Recent research in ubiquitous computing uses technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs) to monitor the person's kinematics and physiological parameters. In this paper we propose a real time mobile health system for monitoring elderly patients from indoor or outdoor environments. The system uses a bio- signal sensor worn by the patient and a Smartphone as a central node. The sensor data is collected and transmitted to the intelligent server through GPRS/UMTS to be analyzed. The prototype (UMHMSE) monitors the elderly mobility, location and vital signs such as Sp02 and Heart Rate. Remote users (family and medical personnel) might have a real time access to the collected information through a web application.
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paper_title: P-rake receivers in different measured WBAN hospital channels

paper_content:

In wireless applications, power consumption has been, and will be, one of the important characteristics when designing any wireless device. This is the case especially in sensor networks where a single sensor may be functioning, hopefully for very long time, without external power source. Generally, the architecture complexity reduces the battery life, but the performance increases with complexity. The best performance is achieved with the most complex devices which, however, consume a lot of power. Rake receivers can offer a good tradeoff between complexity and performance. In the near future, due to the aging of population, personal medical applications are most likely increasing in number and gaining more attention in industry. This paper presents simulation results for IEEE 802.15.4a ultra wideband (UWB) rake receivers in measured hospital channel. Oulu University Hospital in Oulu, Finland, was the location of the wireless body area network (WBAN) channel model measurements.
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Title: Ubiquitous HealthCare in Wireless Body Area Networks - A Survey

Section 1: INTRODUCTION
Description 1: This section introduces the need for a comprehensive healthcare system for elderly people and the role of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) in providing ubiquitous healthcare (UHC).

Section 2: RELATED WORK
Description 2: This section discusses previous research related to path loss models, UHC architectures, energy-efficient algorithms, and sensor placement techniques in WBAN.

Section 3: MOST FREQUENTLY USED STANDARDS FOR WBAN COMMUNICATION
Description 3: This section covers the various standards adopted for WBAN communication, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, MICS, and UWB, and their applications.

Section 4: PATH LOSS IN WBAN
Description 4: This section details the factors contributing to path loss in WBAN, including free space impairments and the effects of reflection, diffraction, and refraction.

Section 5: WBAN
Description 5: This section outlines the different types of nodes in WBAN and the characterization of electromagnetic wave propagation for In-Body, On-Body, and External node communications.

Section 6: RAKE RECEIVER
Description 6: This section discusses the use of Rake receivers in WBAN, their types, and their performance in terms of power consumption and complexity.

Section 7: Effect of WBAN Antennas
Description 7: This section describes the influence of antenna placement on the surface or inside the body, and the different types of antennas suitable for WBAN communication.

Section 8: Characteristics of Human Body
Description 8: This section explains the impact of the human body's dielectric constants, thickness, and impedance on wireless communication in WBAN.

Section 9: SCENARIOS OF PATH LOSS IN WBAN
Description 9: This section examines various scenarios of path loss in WBAN, including In-Body and On-Body communications, and presents simulations to analyze these effects.

Section 10: WBAN Channel Model
Description 10: This section describes the WBAN channel model, including the fading and path losses experienced by propagation paths and the overall channel characteristics.

Section 11: Evaluation of M-ary Modulations through a WBAN Channel
Description 11: This section evaluates the error rate link performance of different M-ary modulation schemes in WBAN channels through simulations.

Section 12: Conclusion
Description 12: This section summarizes the findings of the survey, highlighting the importance of WBAN in UHC and discussing the results of simulations for path loss and modulation schemes in WBAN.