A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments
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paper_title: Early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease: recommendations from diagnostic clinical guidelines.

paper_content:

Therapeutic options for Parkinson's disease (PD) are currently limited to symptomatic agents. Levodopa is the most efficacious treatment; however, higher doses and long-term use are associated with adverse effects such as motor fluctuations and dyskinesia. Early treatment of PD with other agents such as dopamine agonists and monoamine oxidase type B inhibitors can provide symptomatic benefit and delay initiation of levodopa therapy. Early treatment of PD is contingent upon early and accurate diagnosis of the disease, which can be challenging because there are no biomarkers or neuroimaging or other clinical tests available to confirm the diagnosis. PD diagnosis is currently based on the presence or absence of various clinical features and the experience of the treating physician. A definitive diagnosis can be made only after autopsy. Moreover, the signs and symptoms present in early PD can resemble those of a number of other movement disorders, particularly other forms of parkinsonism, such as multiple system atrophy, drug-induced parkinsonism, and vascular parkinsonism, as well as diffuse Lewy body disease and essential tremor. Nevertheless, diagnosis of PD based on clinical features and response to antiparkinsonian medication can be achieved with a fairly high level of accuracy, particularly when made by a physician specializing in movement disorders. This article reviews and summarizes published recommendations for the clinical diagnosis of PD.
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paper_title: A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks

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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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paper_title: A Comprehensive Overview of Wireless Body Area Networks WBAN

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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.
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paper_title: Body Area Networks: A Survey

paper_content:

Advances in wireless communication technologies, such as wearable and implantable biosensors, along with recent developments in the embedded computing area are enabling the design, development, and implementation of body area networks. This class of networks is paving the way for the deployment of innovative healthcare monitoring applications. In the past few years, much of the research in the area of body area networks has focused on issues related to wireless sensor designs, sensor miniaturization, low-power sensor circuitry, signal processing, and communications protocols. In this paper, we present an overview of body area networks, and a discussion of BAN communications types and their related issues. We provide a detailed investigation of sensor devices, physical layer, data link layer, and radio technology aspects of BAN research. We also present a taxonomy of BAN projects that have been introduced/proposed to date. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make BANs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.
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paper_title: A Review on Telemedicine-Based WBAN Framework for Patient Monitoring

paper_content:

Abstract Objective: In this article, we describe the important aspects like major characteristics, research issues, and challenges with body area sensor networks in telemedicine systems for patient monitoring in different scenarios. Present and emerging developments in communications integrated with the developments in microelectronics and embedded system technologies will have a dramatic impact on future patient monitoring and health information delivery systems. The important challenges are bandwidth limitations, power consumption, and skin or tissue protection. Materials and Methods: This article presents a detailed survey on wireless body area networks (WBANs). Results and Conclusions: We have designed the framework for integrating body area networks on telemedicine systems. Recent trends, overall WBAN-telemedicine framework, and future research scope have also been addressed in this article.
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paper_title: Review: Health Care Utilization and Costs of Elderly Persons With Multiple Chronic Conditions

paper_content:

This systematic literature review identified and summarized 35 studies that investigated the relationship between multiple chronic conditions (MCCs) and health care utilization outcomes (i.e. physician use, hospital use, medication use) and health care cost outcomes (medication costs, out-of-pocket costs, total health care costs) for elderly general populations. Although synthesis of studies was complicated because of ambiguous definitions and measurements of MCCs, and because of the multitude of outcomes investigated, almost all studies observed a positive association of MCCs and use/costs, many of which found that use/costs significantly increased with each additional condition. Several studies indicate a curvilinear, near exponential relationship between MCCs and costs. The rising prevalence, substantial costs, and the fear that current care arrangements may be inappropriate for many patients with MCCs, bring about a multitude of implications for research and policy, of which the most important are presented and discussed.
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paper_title: Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease: Clinical and Economic Benefits

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An estimated four million individuals in the United States have Alzheimer's disease (AD). This number is expected to more than triple by mid-century. Primary care physicians have a key role in evaluating older patients for early signs of dementia and in initiating treatment that can significantly retard its progression over the maximum period of time. That role and its challenges will inevitably grow along with the expected increase in the population aged 65 and older. The tendency for physicians to dismiss memory complaints as normal aging must be replaced by awareness of the need to assess and possibly intervene. Early intervention is the optimal strategy, not only because the patient's level of function will be preserved for a longer period, but also because community-dwelling patients with AD incur less societal cost than those who require long-term institutional placement. Institutionalization contributes heavily to the annual cost of care for AD in the United States, which is estimated to be $100 billion annually.
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paper_title: An Ambient Assisted Living System for Telemedicine with Detection of Symptoms

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Elderly people have a high risk of health problems. Hence, we propose an architecture for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that supports pre-hospital health emergencies, remote monitoring of patients with chronic conditions and medical collaboration through sharing of health-related information resources (using the European electronic health records CEN/ISO EN13606). Furthermore, it is going to use medical data from vital signs for, on the one hand, the detection of symptoms using a simple rule system (e.g. fever), and on the other hand, the prediction of illness using chronobiology algorithms (e.g. prediction of myocardial infarction eight days before). So this architecture provides a great variety of communication interfaces to get vital signs of patients from a heterogeneous set of sources, as well as it supports the more important technologies for Home Automation. Therefore, we can combine security, comfort and ambient intelligence with a telemedicine solution, thereby, improving the quality of life in elderly people.
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paper_title: The global burden of chronic diseases: overcoming impediments to prevention and control.

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Chronic diseases are the largest cause of death in the world. In 2002, the leading chronic diseases--cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes--caused 29 million deaths worldwide. Despite growing evidence of epidemiological and economic impact, the global response to the problem remains inadequate. Stakeholders include governments, the World Health Organization and other United Nations bodies, academic and research groups, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector. Lack of financial support retards capacity development for prevention, treatment, and research in most developing countries. Reasons for this include that up-to-date evidence related to the nature of the burden of chronic diseases is not in the hands of decision makers and strong beliefs persist that chronic diseases afflict only the affluent and the elderly, that they arise solely from freely acquired risks, and that their control is ineffective and too expensive and should wait until infectious diseases are addressed. The influence of global economic factors on chronic disease risks impedes progress, as does the orientation of health systems toward acute care. We identify 3 policy levers to address these impediments elevating chronic diseases on the health agenda of key policymakers, providing them with better evidence about risk factor control, and persuading them of the need for health systems change. A more concerted, strategic, and multisectoral policy approach, underpinned by solid research, is essential to help reverse the negative trends in the global incidence of chronic disease.
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paper_title: Early detection of CKD: the benefits, limitations and effects on prognosis

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The past decade has seen an increasing focus on chronic kidney disease (CKD) and its attendant complications, which has resulted in improved understanding of their impact on health-care resources. The early detection of CKD has been facilitated by the implementation of routine reporting of estimated glomerular filtration rates (eGFRs) and by education of primary care physicians on the implications of detecting a decreased eGFR with respect to patient safety as well as to cardiovascular and renal outcomes. The goals of early CKD detection are to prevent CKD progression and associated complications, thus improving patient outcomes and reducing the impact of CKD on health-care resources. This Review examines the benefits of the early detection of CKD, and describes the limitations of current knowledge with respect to screening, early detection and treatment, as well as the unintended consequences of detection. In addition, this article highlights what is currently known about cardiovascular and renal outcomes and the effects of intervention in patients with CKD.
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paper_title: Effects of exercise and diet on chronic disease

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Currently, modern chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and cancer, are the leading killers in Westernized society and are increasing rampantly in developing nations. In fact, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are now even commonplace in children. Clearly, however, there is a solution to this epidemic of metabolic disease that is inundating today’s societies worldwide: exercise and diet. Overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources, including epidemiological, prospective cohort, and intervention studies, links most chronic diseases seen in the world today to physical inactivity and inappropriate diet consumption. The purpose of this review is to 1 ) discuss the effects of exercise and diet in the prevention of chronic disease, 2 ) highlight the effects of lifestyle modification for both mitigating disease progression and reversing existing disease, and 3 ) suggest potential mechanisms for beneficial effects.
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paper_title: A Comprehensive Survey of Wireless Body Area Networks

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Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted.
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paper_title: The Growing Burden of Chronic Disease in America

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a In 2000, approximately 125 million Americans (45% of the population) had chronic conditions and 61 million (21% of the population) had multiple chronic conditions. The number of people with chronic conditions is projected to increase steadily for the next 30 years. While current health care financing and delivery systems are designed primarily to treat acute conditions, 78% of health spending is devoted to people with chronic conditions. Quality medical care for people with chronic conditions requires a new orientation toward prevention of chronic disease and provision of ongoing care and care manage- ment to maintain their health status and functioning. Specific focus should be applied to people with multiple chronic conditions.
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paper_title: Improving transmission reliability of low-power medium access control protocols using average diversity combining

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Embedded computer systems equipped with wireless communication transceivers are nowadays used in a vast number of application scenarios. Energy consumption is important in many of these scenarios, as systems are battery operated and long maintenance-free operation is required. To achieve this goal, embedded systems employ low-power communication transceivers and protocols. However, currently used protocols cannot operate efficiently when communication channels are highly erroneous. In this study, we show how average diversity combining (ADC) can be used in state-of-the-art low-power communication protocols. This novel approach improves transmission reliability and in consequence energy consumption and transmission latency in the presence of erroneous channels. Using a testbed, we show that highly erroneous channels are indeed a common occurrence in situations, where low-power systems are used and we demonstrate that ADC improves low-power communication dramatically.
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paper_title: Reliability comparison of transmit/receive diversity and error control coding in low-power medium access control protocols

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Low-power medium access control (MAC) protocols used for communication of energy constraint wireless embedded devices do not cope well with situations where transmission channels are highly erroneous. Existing MAC protocols discard corrupted messages which lead to costly retransmissions. To improve transmission performance, it is possible to include an error correction scheme and transmit/receive diversity. It is possible to add redundant information to transmitted packets in order to recover data from corrupted packets. It is also possible to make use of transmit/receive diversity via multiple antennas to improve error resiliency of transmissions. Both schemes may be used in conjunction to further improve the performance. In this study, the authors show how an error correction scheme and transmit/receive diversity can be integrated in low-power MAC protocols. Furthermore, the authors investigate the achievable performance gains of both methods. This is important as both methods have associated costs (processing requirements; additional antennas and power) and for a given communication situation it must be decided which methods should be employed. The authors’ results show that, in many practical situations, error control coding outperforms transmission diversity; however, if very high reliability is required, it is useful to employ both schemes together.
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paper_title: Antennas and propagation for body centric communications

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Body centric wireless communication is now accepted as an important part of 4th generation mobile communications systems. The design of antennas and the characterisation of radiowave propagation on the body are now being considered, by many groups around the world. The paper gives a brief overview of the current position and reports on some recent advances in the topic.
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paper_title: A Survey of Communications and Networking Technologies for Energy Management in Buildings and Home Automation

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With the exploding power consumption in private households and increasing environmental and regulatory restraints, the need to improve the overall efficiency of electrical networks has never been greater. That being said, the most efficient way to minimize the power consumption is by voluntary mitigation of home electric energy consumption, based on energy-awareness and automatic or manual reduction of standby power of idling home appliances. Deploying bi-directional smart meters and home energy management (HEM) agents that provision real-time usage monitoring and remote control, will enable HEM in “smart households.” Furthermore, the traditionally inelastic demand curve has began to change, and these emerging HEM technologies enable consumers (industrial to residential) to respond to the energy market behavior to reduce their consumption at peak prices, to supply reserves on a as-needed basis, and to reduce demand on the electric grid. Because the development of smart grid-related activities has resulted in an increased interest in demand response (DR) and demand side management (DSM) programs, this paper presents some popular DR and DSM initiatives that include planning, implementation and evaluation techniques for reducing energy consumption and peak electricity demand. The paper then focuses on reviewing and distinguishing the various state-of-the-art HEM control and networking technologies, and outlines directions for promoting the shift towards a society with low energy demand and low greenhouse gas emissions. The paper also surveys the existing software and hardware tools, platforms, and test beds for evaluating the performance of the information and communications technologies that are at the core of future smart grids. It is envisioned that this paper will inspire future research and design efforts in developing standardized and user-friendly smart energy monitoring systems that are suitable for wide scale deployment in homes.
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paper_title: Antennas and propagation for on-body communication systems

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Studies on the narrowband characterization of the on-body propagation channel show variations of up to 40dB in link loss for different antenna position and body posture. Channels on the body trunk show small variance of the path gain probability density function, whilst those involving the arms or legs a much greater variance. For most cases the monopole antenna located with the ground plane parallel to the body surface give least loss. For ultra wideband channels, path delay is highest for non line of sight links around the body and delay spreads are generally less than 10nsec. Link modeling using a free space assumption gives results within 10dB, but for more accurate modeling full body modeling is required and an example is given using locally distorted non-orthogonal FD-TD.
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paper_title: A Survey of Recent Developments in Home M2M Networks

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Recent years have witnessed the emergence of machine-to-machine (M2M) networks as an efficient means for providing automated communications among distributed devices. Automated M2M communications can offset the overhead costs of conventional operations, thus promoting their wider adoption in fixed and mobile platforms equipped with embedded processors and sensors/actuators. In this paper, we survey M2M technologies for applications such as healthcare, energy management and entertainment. In particular, we examine the typical architectures of home M2M networks and discuss the performance tradeoffs in existing designs. Our investigation covers quality of service, energy efficiency and security issues. Moreover, we review existing home networking projects to better understand the real-world applicability of these systems. This survey contributes to better understanding of the challenges in existing M2M networks and further shed new light on future research directions.
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paper_title: A Power Line Communication Network Infrastructure for The Smart Home

paper_content:

Low voltage electrical wiring has largely been dismissed as too noisy and unpredictable to support high-speed communication signals. Advances in communication and modulation methodologies as well as in adaptive digital signal processing and error detection and correction have spawned novel protocols capable of supporting power line communication networks at speeds comparable to wired LANs. We motivate the use of power line LANs as a basic infrastructure for building integrated smart homes, wherein information appliances ranging from simple control or monitoring devices to multimedia entertainment systems are seamlessly interconnected by the very wires that provide them electricity. By simulation and actual measurements using "reference design" prototype commercial powerline products, we show that the HomePlug MAC and PHY layers can guarantee QoS for real-time communications, supporting delay-sensitive data streams for smart home applications.
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paper_title: VLSI Circuits for Biomedical Applications

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VLSI (very large scale integration) is the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistor based circuits into a single chip. Written by top-notch international experts in industry and academia, this groundbreaking resource presents a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of VLSI circuit design for a wide range of applications in biology and medicine.Supported with over 280 illustrations and over 160 equations, the book offers cutting-edge guidance on designing integrated circuits for wireless biosensing, body implants, biosensing interfaces, and molecular biology. Engineers discover innovative design techniques and novel materials to help them achieve higher levels circuit and system performance. This invaluable volume is essential reading for professionals and graduate students with a serious interest in circuit design and future biomedical technology.
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paper_title: Energy efficient communication in body area networks using collaborative communication in Rayleigh fading channel

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Due to resource limited nature of nodes in body area networks (BAN), it is often very difficult to replace or recharge its power source. To prolong the network's life, only way out is energy efficient communication system. In this article an energy efficient communication system based on collaborative communication is proposed for BAN. Signals from the implanted nodes are received out-of-phase at the base station with no line-of-sight through an AWGN channel. Mathematical model derived here is based on three figures of merit i.e, received power, bit error rate and energy consumption. Analysis of the proposed model and Monte Carlo simulation show that the gain in received power increases as the number of collaborative nodes increase whereas BER is directly related to SNR $$(E_b/N_0)$$(Eb/N0). To evaluate energy consumption of the proposed system, it is compared with single-input-single-output (SISO) system. In this comparison it has been found that SISO performs well at short distances but collaborative communication outperforms SISO in case of long distances. It is also found that collaborative communication requires "N $$\times $$× Transmitted power", less transmission power in comparison to SISO systems. It is observed that collaborative communication achieve energy saving very close to 99 %. On the basis of these results it is safe to recommend collaborative communication for resource limited BAN.
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paper_title: Towards the fast and robust optimal design of Wireless Body Area Networks

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Wireless body area networks are wireless sensor networks whose adoption has recently emerged and spread in important healthcare applications, such as the remote monitoring of health conditions of patients. A major issue associated with the deployment of such networks is represented by energy consumption: in general, the batteries of the sensors cannot be easily replaced and recharged, so containing the usage of energy by a rational design of the network and of the routing is crucial. Another issue is represented by traffic uncertainty: body sensors may produce data at a variable rate that is not exactly known in advance, for example because the generation of data is event-driven. Neglecting traffic uncertainty may lead to wrong design and routing decisions, which may compromise the functionality of the network and have very bad effects on the health of the patients. In order to address these issues, in this work we propose the first robust optimization model for jointly optimizing the topology and the routing in body area networks under traffic uncertainty. Since the problem may result challenging even for a state-of-the-art optimization solver, we propose an original optimization algorithm that exploits suitable linear relaxations to guide a randomized fixing of the variables, supported by an exact large variable neighborhood search. Experiments on realistic instances indicate that our algorithm performs better than a state-of-the-art solver, fast producing solutions associated with improved optimality gaps.
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paper_title: Energy efficient cooperative transmission in single-relay UWB based body area networks

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Energy efficiency is one of the most critical parameters in ultra-wideband (UWB) based wireless body area networks (WBANs). In this paper, the energy efficiency optimization problem is investigated for cooperative transmission with a single relay in UWB based WBANs. Two practical onbody transmission scenarios are taken into account, namely, along-torso scenario and around-torso scenario. With a proposed single-relay WBAN model, a joint optimal scheme for the energy efficiency optimization is developed, which not only derives the optimal power allocation but also seeks the corresponding optimal relay location for each scenario. Simulation results show that the utilization of a relay node is necessary for the energy efficient transmission in particular for the around-torso scenario and the relay location is an important parameter. With the joint optimal relay location and power allocation, the proposed scheme is able to achieve up to 30 times improvement compared to direct transmission in terms of the energy efficiency when the battery of the sensor node is very limited, which indicates that it is an effective way to prolong the network lifetime in WBANs.
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paper_title: Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation with QoS Support in Wireless Body Area Networks

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Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has become a promising type of networks to provide applications such as real-time health monitoring and ubiquitous e-Health services. One challenge in the design of WBAN is that energy efficiency needs to be ensured to increase the network lifetime in such a resourceconstrained network. Another critical challenge for WBAN is that quality of service (QoS) requirements, including packet loss rate (PLR), throughput and delay, should be guaranteed even under the highly dynamic environment due to changing of body postures. In this paper, we design a unified framework of energy efficient resource allocation scheme for WBAN, in which both constraints of QoS metrics and the characteristics of dynamic links are considered. A transmission rate allocation policy (TRAP) is proposed to carefully adjust the transmission rate at each sensor such that more strict PLR requirement could be achieved even when the link quality is very poor. A QoS optimization problem is then formulated to optimize the transmission power and allocated time slots for each sensor, which minimizes energy consumption subject to the QoS constraints. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed transmission rate allocation policy and the resource allocation scheme.
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paper_title: An Energy-Efficient Hybrid System for Wireless Body Area Network Applications

paper_content:

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) consist of a number of miniaturized wearable or implanted sensor nodes that are employed to monitor vital parameters of a patient over long duration of time. These sensors capture physiological data and wirelessly transfer the collected data to a local base station in order to be further processed. Almost all of these body sensors are expected to have low data-rate and to run on a battery. Since recharging or replacing the battery is not a simple task specifically in the case of implanted devices such as pacemakers, extending the lifetime of sensor nodes in WBANs is one of the greatest challenges. To achieve this goal, WBAN systems employ low-power communication transceivers and low duty cycle Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. Although, currently used MAC protocols are able to reduce the energy consumption of devices for transmission and reception, yet they are still unable to offer an ultimate energy self-sustaining solution for low-power MAC protocols. This paper proposes to utilize energy harvesting technologies in low-power MAC protocols. This novel approach can further reduce energy consumption of devices in WBAN systems.
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paper_title: Power reduction by varying sampling rate

paper_content:

The rate at which a digital signal processing (DSP) system operates depends on the highest frequency component in the input signal. DSP applications must sample their inputs at a frequency at least twice the highest frequency in the input signal (i.e., the Nyquist rate) to accurately reproduce the signal. Typically a fixed sampling rate, guaranteed to always be high enough, is used. However, an input signal may have periods when the signal has little high frequency content as well as periods of silence. When the input signal has no perceptible high frequency components, the system can reduce its sampling rate, thereby reducing the number of samples processed per second, allowing the CPU speed to be scaled down without reducing output quality. This paper describes how to reduce power consumption in DSP applications by varying the amount of processing based on the input signal, and reports results of experiments with a prototype implementation. Experiments with a prototype show that when the system performs little processing, the added overhead of the variable sampling rate technique increased power consumption. When the system performs more processing, 18 FIR filters per frame, the power consumption was reduced to 40 % of the power required for a static sampling rate, while not reducing sound quality.
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paper_title: Co-LAEEBA: Cooperative link aware and energy efficient protocol for wireless body area networks

paper_content:

Proposed model gives energy efficient communications for human body in WBAN.Link aware communications.Cooperative routing decreases path loss.Cooperative routing allows more frequent data gathering. Performance evaluation of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is primarily conducted in terms of simulation based studies. From this perspective, recent research has focused on channel modeling, and energy conservation at Network/MAC layer. Most of these studies ignore collaborative learning and path loss. In this paper, we present Link-Aware and Energy Efficient protocol for wireless Body Area networks (LAEEBA) and Cooperative Link-Aware and Energy Efficient protocol for wireless Body Area networks (Co-LAEEBA) routing schemes. Unlike existing schemes, the proposed work factors in collaborative learning and path loss. Cost functions are introduced to learn and select the most feasible route from a given node to sink while sharing each others distance and residual energy information. Simulation results show improved performance of the proposed protocols in comparison to the selected existing ones in terms of the chosen performance metrics.
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paper_title: Trading off prediction accuracy and power consumption for context-aware wearable computing

paper_content:

Context-aware mobile computing requires wearable sensors to acquire information about the user. Continuous sensing rapidly depletes the -wearable system's energy, which is a critically constrained resource. In this paper, we analyze the trade-off between power consumption and prediction accuracy of context classifiers working on dual-axis accelerometer data collected from the eWaich sensing and notification platform. We improve power consumption techniques by providing competitive classification performance even in the low frequency region of 1-10 Hz and for the highly erratic wrist based sensing location. Furthermore, we propose and analyze a collection of selective sampling strategies in order to reduce the number of required sensor readings and the computation cycles even further. Our results indicate that optimized sampling schemes can increase the deployment lifetime of a wearable computing platform by a factor of four without a significant loss in prediction accuracy.
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paper_title: UWB on-body radio channel modeling using ray theory and subband FDTD method

paper_content:

This paper presents the ultra-wideband on-body radio channel modeling using a subband finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method and a model combining the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD) and ray tracing (RT). In the subband FDTD model, the frequency band (3-9 GHz) is uniformly divided into 12 subbands in order to take into account the material frequency dispersion. Each subband is simulated separately and then a combination technique is used to recover all simulations at the receiver. In the UTD/RT model, the RT technique is used to find the surface diffracted ray path, while the UTD is applied for calculating the received signal. Respective modeling results from two- and three-dimensional subband FDTD and UTD/RT models indicate that antenna patterns have significant impacts on the on-body radio channel. The effect of different antenna types on on-body radio channels is also investigated through the UTD/RT approach.
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paper_title: Dynamic Channel Modeling for Multi-Sensor Body Area Networks

paper_content:

A channel model for time-variant multi-link wireless body area networks (WBANs) is proposed in this paper, based on an extensive measurement campaign using a multi-port channel sounder. A total of 12 nodes were placed on the body to measure the multi-link channel within the created WBAN. The resulting empirical model takes into account the received power, the link fading statistics, and the link auto- and cross-correlations. The distance dependence of the received power is investigated, and the link fading is modeled by a log-normal distribution. The link autocorrelation function is divided into a decaying component and a sinusoidal component to account for the periodical movement of the limbs caused by walking. The cross-correlation between different links is also shown to be high for a number of specific on-body links. Finally, the model is validated by considering several extraction-independent validation metrics: multi-hop link capacity, level crossing rate (LCR) and average fade duration (AFD). The capacity aims at validating the path-loss and fading model, while the LCR and AFD aim at validating the temporal behavior. For all validation metrics, the model is shown to satisfactorily reproduce the measurements, whereas its limits are pointed out.
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paper_title: Dynamic Channel Modeling at 2.4 GHz for On-Body Area Networks

paper_content:

In wireless body area networks, on-body radio propagation channels are typically time-varying, because of the frequent body movements. The dynamic local body scattering dominates the temporal and spatial properties of the on-body channels. The influence varies largely depending on the distribution of the channels and the modes of body movements. In this paper, we present some major achievements on the dynamic onbody channel modeling at 2.4 GHz under the framework of the COST 2100 action. Results of two complementary measurement campaigns are presented: a geometry-based one on a single subject, and a scenario-based one covering different subjects. Statistical models including the Doppler spectrum and the spatial correlation of on-body channels are presented. An analytical model is also introduced to offer a time-space description of the on-body channels, which is validated by the geometry-based measurement campaign.
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paper_title: A Power Line Communication Network Infrastructure for The Smart Home

paper_content:

Low voltage electrical wiring has largely been dismissed as too noisy and unpredictable to support high-speed communication signals. Advances in communication and modulation methodologies as well as in adaptive digital signal processing and error detection and correction have spawned novel protocols capable of supporting power line communication networks at speeds comparable to wired LANs. We motivate the use of power line LANs as a basic infrastructure for building integrated smart homes, wherein information appliances ranging from simple control or monitoring devices to multimedia entertainment systems are seamlessly interconnected by the very wires that provide them electricity. By simulation and actual measurements using "reference design" prototype commercial powerline products, we show that the HomePlug MAC and PHY layers can guarantee QoS for real-time communications, supporting delay-sensitive data streams for smart home applications.
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paper_title: A Review on Telemedicine-Based WBAN Framework for Patient Monitoring

paper_content:

Abstract Objective: In this article, we describe the important aspects like major characteristics, research issues, and challenges with body area sensor networks in telemedicine systems for patient monitoring in different scenarios. Present and emerging developments in communications integrated with the developments in microelectronics and embedded system technologies will have a dramatic impact on future patient monitoring and health information delivery systems. The important challenges are bandwidth limitations, power consumption, and skin or tissue protection. Materials and Methods: This article presents a detailed survey on wireless body area networks (WBANs). Results and Conclusions: We have designed the framework for integrating body area networks on telemedicine systems. Recent trends, overall WBAN-telemedicine framework, and future research scope have also been addressed in this article.
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paper_title: A Review on Telemedicine-Based WBAN Framework for Patient Monitoring

paper_content:

Abstract Objective: In this article, we describe the important aspects like major characteristics, research issues, and challenges with body area sensor networks in telemedicine systems for patient monitoring in different scenarios. Present and emerging developments in communications integrated with the developments in microelectronics and embedded system technologies will have a dramatic impact on future patient monitoring and health information delivery systems. The important challenges are bandwidth limitations, power consumption, and skin or tissue protection. Materials and Methods: This article presents a detailed survey on wireless body area networks (WBANs). Results and Conclusions: We have designed the framework for integrating body area networks on telemedicine systems. Recent trends, overall WBAN-telemedicine framework, and future research scope have also been addressed in this article.
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paper_title: An Overview of IEEE 802.15.6 Standard

paper_content:

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has emerged as a key technology to provide real-time health monitoring of a patient and to diagnose and treat many life threatening diseases. WBAN operates in close vicinity to, on, or inside a human body and supports a variety of medical and non-medical applications. IEEE 802 has established a Task Group called IEEE 802.15.6 for the standardization of WBAN. The purpose of the group is to establish a communication standard optimized for low-power in-body/on-body nodes to serve a variety of medical and non-medical applications. This paper explains the most important features of the new IEEE 802.15.6 standard. The standard defines a Medium Access Control (MAC) layer supporting several Physical (PHY) layers. We briefly overview the PHY and MAC layers specifications together with the bandwidth efficiency of IEEE 802.15.6 standard. We also discuss the security paradigm of the standard.
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paper_title: Design and Application of RuBee-Based Telemedicine Data Acquisition System

paper_content:

Telemedicine can be defined as the delivery of health care and sharing of medical knowledge over a distance using telecommunication. This paper introduced the new technology of RuBee, RuBee fills the drawback of RFID tags which have no network and cannot be programmable, which has made tremendous progress for the development of the telemedicine. A brief introduction of the RuBee protocol, and analyzed the design of RuBee Router and its application in the Telemedicine System. Provide a snapshot of the applications of electronic patient record, emergency telemedicine and home monitoring etc. in wireless telemedicine systems.
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paper_title: A comparative study of short range wireless sensor network on high density networks

paper_content:

ZigBee, Wibree, Z-Wave, and RuBee are four protocol standards for short range wireless communications with low power consumption. From an application point of view, ZigBee is designed for reliable wirelessly networked monitoring and control networks, RuBee is proposed for high security applications and use in harsh environment, Wibree considered for sports and healthcare while Z-Wave is planned for residential control systems. In this paper, after an overview of the mentioned four short-range wireless protocols, we attempt to make a preliminary comparison of them and then specifically study their radio frequency, data coding, security etc. At last we have compared different protocols capabilities in high density network.
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paper_title: Link Technologies and BlackBerry Mobile Health (mHealth) Solutions: A Review

paper_content:

The number of wearable wireless sensors is expected to grow to 400 million by the year 2014, while the number of operational mobile subscribers has already passed the 5.2 billion mark in 2011. This growth results in an increasing number of mobile applications including: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, Electronic-Health (eHealth), and Mobile-Health (mHealth). A number of emerging mobile applications that require 3G and 4G mobile networks for data transport relate to telemedicine, including establishing, maintaining, and transmitting health-related information, research, education, and training. This review paper takes a closer look at these applications, specifically with regard to the healthcare industry and their underlying link technologies. The authors believe that the BlackBerry platform and the associated infrastructure (i.e., BlackBerry Enterprise Server) is a logical and practical solution for eHealth, mHealth, sensor and M2M deployments, which are considered in this paper.
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paper_title: Survey of the DASH7 Alliance Protocol for 433 MHz Wireless Sensor Communication

paper_content:

433 MHz is getting more attention for Machine-to-Machine communication. This paper presents the DASH7 Alliance Protocol, an active RFID alliance standard for 433 MHz wireless sensor communication based on the ISO/IEC 18000-7. First, the major differences of 433 MHz communication compared to more frequently used frequencies, such as 2.4 GHz and 868/920 MHz are explained. Subsequently, the general concepts of DASH7 Alliance Protocol are described, such as the BLAST networking topology and the different OSI layer implementations, in a top-down method. Basic DASH7 features such as the advertising protocol, ad-hoc synchronization and query based addressing are used to explain the different layers. Finally, the paper introduces a software stack implementation named OSS-7, which is an open source implementation of the DASH7 alliance protocol used for testing, rapid prototyping, and demonstrations.
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paper_title: DASH7 alliance protocol 1.0: Low-power, mid-range sensor and actuator communication

paper_content:

This paper presents the DASH7 Alliance Protocol 1.0. It is an industry alliance standard for wireless sensor and actuator communication using the unlicensed sub-1 GHz bands. The paper explains its historic relation to active RFID standards ISO 18000-7 for 433 MHz communication, the basic concepts and communication paradigms of the protocol. Since the protocol is a full OSI stack specification, the paper discusses the implementation of every OSI layer.
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paper_title: Wireless Network Standards for Building Automation

paper_content:

This chapter gives an overview over several existing wireless network standards with their main usage, used frequency band, modulation, transfer speed as well as features and limitations, based on their data sheets. The main intention of this chapter is an assistance to choose the best fitting protocol for a given application. Therefore some typical scenarios for applications are described and after a preselection based on the main application the wireless network protocols are compared to find the best protocol for each scenario.
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paper_title: Link Technologies and BlackBerry Mobile Health (mHealth) Solutions: A Review

paper_content:

The number of wearable wireless sensors is expected to grow to 400 million by the year 2014, while the number of operational mobile subscribers has already passed the 5.2 billion mark in 2011. This growth results in an increasing number of mobile applications including: Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, Electronic-Health (eHealth), and Mobile-Health (mHealth). A number of emerging mobile applications that require 3G and 4G mobile networks for data transport relate to telemedicine, including establishing, maintaining, and transmitting health-related information, research, education, and training. This review paper takes a closer look at these applications, specifically with regard to the healthcare industry and their underlying link technologies. The authors believe that the BlackBerry platform and the associated infrastructure (i.e., BlackBerry Enterprise Server) is a logical and practical solution for eHealth, mHealth, sensor and M2M deployments, which are considered in this paper.
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paper_title: Mbps experimental acoustic through-tissue communications: MEAT-COMMS

paper_content:

Methods for digital, phase-coherent acoustic communication date to at least the work of Stojanjovic, et al [20], and the added robustness afforded by improved phase tracking and compensation of Johnson, et al [21]. This work explores the use of such methods for communications through tissue for potential biomedical applications, using the tremendous bandwidth available in commercial medical ultrasound transducers. While long-range ocean acoustic experiments have been at rates of under 100kbps, typically on the order of 1- 10kbps, data rates in excess of 120Mb/s have been achieved over cm-scale distances in ultrasonic testbeds [19]. This paper describes experimental transmission of digital communication signals through samples of real pork tissue and beef liver, achieving data rates of 20-30Mbps, demonstrating the possibility of real-time video-rate data transmission through tissue for inbody ultrasonic communications with implanted medical devices.
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paper_title: Signal Transmission by Galvanic Coupling Through the Human Body

paper_content:

Galvanic coupling is a promising approach for wireless intrabody data transmission between sensors. Using the human body as a transmission medium for electrical signals becomes a novel data communication technique in biomedical monitoring systems. In this paper, special attention is given to the coupling of the current into the human body. Safety requirements have to be fulfilled, and optimal signal coupling is of essence. Therefore, different electrodes are compared. A test system offers up to 1 mA contact current modulated in the frequency range of 10 kHz to 1 MHz. The injected current is up to 20 times below the maximum allowed contact current. Such a low-current approach enables data communication that is more energy saving than other wireless technologies.
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paper_title: Challenges and implications of using ultrasonic communications in intra-body area networks

paper_content:

Body area networks (BANs) promise to enable revolutionary biomedical applications by wirelessly interconnecting devices implanted or worn by humans. However, BAN wireless communications based on radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic waves suffer from poor propagation of signals in body tissues, which leads to high levels of attenuation. In addition, in-body transmissions are constrained to be low-power to prevent overheating of tissues and consequent death of cells. To address the limitations of RF propagation in the human body, we propose a paradigm shift by exploring the use of ultrasonic waves as the physical medium to wirelessly interconnect in-body implanted devices. Acoustic waves are the transmission technology of choice for underwater communications, since they are known to propagate better than their RF counterpart in media composed mainly of water. Similarly, we envision that ultrasound (e.g., acoustic waves at non-audible frequencies) will provide support for communications in the human body, which is composed for 65% of water. In this paper, we first assess the feasibility of using ultrasonic communications in intra-body BANs, i.e., in-body networks where the devices are biomedical sensors that communicate with an actuator/gateway device located inside the body. We discuss the fundamentals of ultrasonic propagation in tissues, and explore important tradeoffs, including the choice of a transmission frequency, transmission power, bandwidth, and transducer size. Then, we discuss future research challenges for ultrasonic networking of intra-body devices at the physical, medium access and network layers of the protocol stack.
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paper_title: Comparison of low-power wireless communication technologies for wearable health-monitoring applications

paper_content:

Health monitoring technologies such as Body Area Network (BAN) systems has gathered a lot of attention during the past few years. Largely encouraged by the rapid increase in the cost of healthcare services and driven by the latest technological advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and wireless communications. BAN technology comprises of a network of body worn or implanted sensors that continuously capture and measure the vital parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels and movement. The collected data must be transferred to a local base station in order to be further processed. Thus, wireless connectivity plays a vital role in such systems. However, wireless connectivity comes at a cost of increased power usage, mainly due to the high energy consumption during data transmission. Unfortunately, battery-operated devices are unable to operate for ultra-long duration of time and are expected to be recharged or replaced once they run out of energy. This is not a simple task especially in the case of implanted devices such as pacemakers. Therefore, prolonging the network lifetime in BAN systems is one of the greatest challenges. In order to achieve this goal, BAN systems take advantage of low-power in-body and on-body/off-body wireless communication technologies. This paper compares some of the existing and emerging low-power communication protocols that can potentially be employed to support the rapid development and deployment of BAN systems.
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paper_title: A Survey on Intrabody Communications for Body Area Network Applications

paper_content:

The rapid increase in healthcare demand has seen novel developments in health monitoring technologies, such as the body area networks (BAN) paradigm. BAN technology envisions a network of continuously operating sensors, which measure critical physical and physiological parameters e.g., mobility, heart rate, and glucose levels. Wireless connectivity in BAN technology is key to its success as it grants portability and flexibility to the user. While radio frequency (RF) wireless technology has been successfully deployed in most BAN implementations, they consume a lot of battery power, are susceptible to electromagnetic interference and have security issues. Intrabody communication (IBC) is an alternative wireless communication technology which uses the human body as the signal propagation medium. IBC has characteristics that could naturally address the issues with RF for BAN technology. This survey examines the on-going research in this area and highlights IBC core fundamentals, current mathematical models of the human body, IBC transceiver designs, and the remaining research challenges to be addressed. IBC has exciting prospects for making BAN technologies more practical in the future.
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paper_title: Wireless sensor devices for animal tracking and control

paper_content:

This paper describes some new wireless sensor hardware ::: developed for pastoral and environmental applications. ::: From our early experiments with Mote hardware we ::: were inspired to develop our devices with improved radio ::: range, solar power capability, mechanical and electrical robustness, ::: and with unique combinations of sensors. Here we ::: describe the design and evolution of a small family of devices: ::: radio/processor board, a soil moisture sensor interface, ::: and a single board multi-sensor unit for animal tracking ::: experiments.
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paper_title: Performance comparison of frequency flopping and direct sequence spread spectrum systems in the 2.4 GHz range

paper_content:

The FHSS and DSSS technologies are described as well as different types of spread coding. DSSS systems can provide higher access data rates (up to 11 Mbit/s) than FHSS systems (up to 3 Mbit/s). More FHSS systems can operate simultaneously in the same area than DSSS systems. DSSS systems have higher interference susceptibility tolerance levels. However, if there is a strong broadband interferer in the operational spectrum, FHSS systems will suffer less due to frequency hopping. Assuming equal transmit powers, DSSS systems have lower power spectral density due to wider operating spectrum. Monte Carlo analysis results show that DSSS systems are more likely to cause interference than FHSS systems. The worst case interference levels are higher when the interferer is an FHSS system. It was shown that this case has a very low probability of occurring.
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paper_title: Ubiquitous WSN for Healthcare: Recent Advances and Future Prospects

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have witnessed rapid advancement in medical applications from real-time telemonitoring and computer-assisted rehabilitation to emergency response systems. In this paper, we present the state-of-the-art research from the ubiquity perspective, and discuss the insights as well as vision of future directions in WSN-based healthcare systems. First, we propose a novel tiered architecture that can be generally applied to WSN-based healthcare systems. Then, we analyze the IEEE 802 series standards in the access layer on their capabilities in setting up WSNs for healthcare. We also explore some of the up-to-date work in the application layer, mostly on the smartphone platforms. Furthermore, in order to develop and integrate effective ubiquitous sensing for healthcare (USH), we highlight four important design goals (i.e., proactiveness, transparency, awareness, and trustworthiness) that should be taken into account in future systems.
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paper_title: Mobile Phone Sensing Systems: A Survey

paper_content:

Mobile phone sensing is an emerging area of interest for researchers as smart phones are becoming the core communication device in people's everyday lives. Sensor enabled mobile phones or smart phones are hovering to be at the center of a next revolution in social networks, green applications, global environmental monitoring, personal and community healthcare, sensor augmented gaming, virtual reality and smart transportation systems. More and more organizations and people are discovering how mobile phones can be used for social impact, including how to use mobile technology for environmental protection, sensing, and to leverage just-in-time information to make our movements and actions more environmentally friendly. In this paper we have described comprehensively all those systems which are using smart phones and mobile phone sensors for humans good will and better human phone interaction.
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paper_title: The MONARCA self-assessment system: Persuasive personal monitoring for bipolar patients

paper_content:

An increasing number of persuasive personal healthcare monitoring systems are being researched, designed and tested, many of them being based on Smartphone technology. These systems could help patients and clinicians monitor and manage mental illness. Mental illness is complex, difficult to treat, and carries social stigma. We describe our setup to support the treatment of bipolar patients using a persuasive mobile phone monitoring system and a web portal.
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paper_title: DistancePPG: Robust non-contact vital signs monitoring using a camera

paper_content:

Vital signs such as pulse rate and breathing rate are currently measured using contact probes. But, non-contact methods for measuring vital signs are desirable both in hospital settings (e.g. in NICU) and for ubiquitous in-situ health tracking (e.g. on mobile phone and computers with webcams). Recently, camera-based non-contact vital sign monitoring have been shown to be feasible. However, camera-based vital sign monitoring is challenging for people with darker skin tone, under low lighting conditions, and/or during movement of an individual in front of the camera. In this paper, we propose distancePPG, a new camera-based vital sign estimation algorithm which addresses these challenges. DistancePPG proposes a new method of combining skin-color change signals from different tracked regions of the face using a weighted average, where the weights depend on the blood perfusion and incident light intensity in the region, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of camera-based estimate. One of our key contributions is a new automatic method for determining the weights based only on the video recording of the subject. The gains in SNR of camera-based PPG estimated using distancePPG translate into reduction of the error in vital sign estimation, and thus expand the scope of camera-based vital sign monitoring to potentially challenging scenarios. Further, a dataset will be released, comprising of synchronized video recordings of face and pulse oximeter based ground truth recordings from the earlobe for people with different skin tones, under different lighting conditions and for various motion scenarios.
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paper_title: Validation of heart rate extraction using video imaging on a built-in camera system of a smartphone

paper_content:

As a smartphone is becoming very popular and its performance is being improved fast, a smartphone shows its potential as a low-cost physiological measurement solution which is accurate and can be used beyond the clinical environment. Because cardiac pulse leads the subtle color change of a skin, a pulsatile signal which can be described as photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal can be measured through recording facial video using a digital camera. In this paper, we explore the potential that the reliable heart rate can be measured remotely by the facial video recorded using smartphone camera. First, using the front facing-camera of a smartphone, facial video was recorded. We detected facial region on the image of each frame using face detection, and yielded the raw trace signal from the green channel of the image. To extract more accurate cardiac pulse signal, we applied independent component analysis (ICA) to the raw trace signal. The heart rate was extracted using frequency analysis of the raw trace signal and the analyzed signal from ICA. The accuracy of the estimated heart rate was evaluated by comparing with the heart rate from reference electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. Finally, we developed FaceBEAT, an iPhone application for remote heart rate measurement, based on this study.
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paper_title: iSleep: unobtrusive sleep quality monitoring using smartphones

paper_content:

The quality of sleep is an important factor in maintaining a healthy life style. To date, technology has not enabled personalized, in-place sleep quality monitoring and analysis. Current sleep monitoring systems are often difficult to use and hence limited to sleep clinics, or invasive to users, e.g., requiring users to wear a device during sleep. This paper presents iSleep -- a practical system to monitor an individual's sleep quality using off-the-shelf smartphone. iSleep uses the built-in microphone of the smartphone to detect the events that are closely related to sleep quality, including body movement, couch and snore, and infers quantitative measures of sleep quality. iSleep adopts a lightweight decision-tree-based algorithm to classify various events based on carefully selected acoustic features, and tracks the dynamic ambient noise characteristics to improve the robustness of classification. We have evaluated iSleep based on the experiment that involves 7 participants and total 51 nights of sleep, as well the data collected from real iSleep users. Our results show that iSleep achieves consistently above 90% accuracy for event classification in a variety of different settings. By providing a fine-grained sleep profile that depicts details of sleep-related events, iSleep allows the user to track the sleep efficiency over time and relate irregular sleep patterns to possible causes.
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paper_title: Adoption of telemedicine: from pilot stage to routine delivery

paper_content:

Today there is much debate about why telemedicine has stalled. Teleradiology is the only widespread telemedicine application. Other telemedicine applications appear to be promising candidates for widespread use, but they remain in the early adoption stage. The objective of this debate paper is to achieve a better understanding of the adoption of telemedicine, to assist those trying to move applications from pilot stage to routine delivery. We have investigated the reasons why telemedicine has stalled by focusing on two, high-level topics: 1) the process of adoption of telemedicine in comparison with other technologies; and 2) the factors involved in the widespread adoption of telemedicine. For each topic, we have formulated hypotheses. First, the advantages for users are the crucial determinant of the speed of adoption of technology in healthcare. Second, the adoption of telemedicine is similar to that of other health technologies and follows an S-shaped logistic growth curve. Third, evidence of cost-effectiveness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the widespread adoption of telemedicine. Fourth, personal incentives for the health professionals involved in service provision are needed before the widespread adoption of telemedicine will occur. The widespread adoption of telemedicine is a major -- and still underdeveloped -- challenge that needs to be strengthened through new research directions. We have formulated four hypotheses, which are all susceptible to experimental verification. In particular, we believe that data about the adoption of telemedicine should be collected from applications implemented on a large-scale, to test the assumption that the adoption of telemedicine follows an S-shaped growth curve. This will lead to a better understanding of the process, which will in turn accelerate the adoption of new telemedicine applications in future. Research is also required to identify suitable financial and professional incentives for potential telemedicine users and understand their importance for widespread adoption.
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paper_title: Body and Visual Sensor Fusion for Motion Analysis in Ubiquitous Healthcare Systems

paper_content:

Human motion analysis provides a valuable solution for monitoring the wellbeing of the elderly, quantifying post-operative patient recovery and monitoring the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. The development of accurate motion analysis models, however, requires the integration of multi-sensing modalities and the utilization of appropriate data analysis techniques. This paper describes a robust framework for improved patient motion analysis by integrating information captured by body and visual sensor networks. Real-time target extraction is applied and a skeletonization procedure is subsequently carried out to quantify the internal motion of moving target and compute two metrics, spatiotemporal cyclic motion between leg segments and head trajectory, for each vision node. Extracted motion metrics from multiple vision nodes and accelerometer information from a wearable body sensor are then fused at the feature level by using K-Nearest Neighbor algorithm and used to classify target’s walking gait into normal or abnormal. The potential value of the proposed framework for patient monitoring is demonstrated and the results obtained from practical experiments are described.
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paper_title: A Wearable Assistant for Gait Training for Parkinson’s Disease with Freezing of Gait in Out-of-the-Lab Environments

paper_content:

People with Parkinson’s disease (PD) suffer from declining mobility capabilities, which cause a prevalent risk of falling. Commonly, short periods of motor blocks occur during walking, known as freezing of gait (FoG). To slow the progressive decline of motor abilities, people with PD usually undertake stationary motor-training exercises in the clinics or supervised by physiotherapists. We present a wearable system for the support of people with PD and FoG. The system is designed for independent use. It enables motor training and gait assistance at home and other unsupervised environments. The system consists of three components. First, FoG episodes are detected in real time using wearable inertial sensors and a smartphone as the processing unit. Second, a feedback mechanism triggers a rhythmic auditory signal to the user to alleviate freeze episodes in an assistive mode. Third, the smartphone-based application features support for training exercises. Moreover, the system allows unobtrusive and long-term monitoring of the user’s clinical condition by transmitting sensing data and statistics to a telemedicine service. We investigate the at-home acceptance of the wearable system in a study with nine PD subjects. Participants deployed and used the system on their own, without any clinical support, at their homes during three protocol sessions in 1 week. Users’ feedback suggests an overall positive attitude toward adopting and using the system in their daily life, indicating that the system supports them in improving their gait. Further, in a data-driven analysis with sensing data from five participants, we study whether there is an observable effect on the gait during use of the system. In three out of five subjects, we observed a decrease in FoG duration distributions over the protocol days during gait-training exercises. Moreover, sensing data-driven analysis shows a decrease in FoG duration and FoG number in four out of five participants when they use the system as a gait-assistive tool during normal daily life activities at home.
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paper_title: A Personalized Exercise Trainer for Elderly

paper_content:

Physical activity provides many physiological benefits. On the one hand it reduces the risk of disease outcomes. On the other hand it is the basis for proper rehabilitation in case of or after a severe disease. Both aspects are especially important for the elderly population. Within this context, the present paper proposes a personalized, home-based exercise trainer for elderly people. The system is based on a wearable sensor network that enables capturing the user's motions. These are then evaluated by comparing them to a prescribed exercise, taking both exercise load and technique into account. Moreover, the results are translated into appropriate feedback to the user to assist the correct exercise execution. A novel part of the system is the generic personalization by means of a supervised teach-in phase.
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paper_title: Anxiety detection using wearable monitoring

paper_content:

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) might be confused with shyness. However, experiencing anxiety can have profound short and long-term implications. During an anxiety span, the subject suffers from blushing, sweating or trembling. Social activities are harder to accomplish and the subject might tend to avoid them. Although there are tested methods to treat SAD such as Exposure Therapy (ET) and Pharmacotherapy, patients do not treat themselves or suspend treatment due economic, time or space barriers. Wearable computing technologies can be used to constantyly monitor user context offering the possibility to detect anxiety spans. In this work we used Google Glass and the Zephyr HxM Bluetooth band to monitor Spontaneous Blink Rate (SBR) and Heart Rate (HR) respectively. We conducted an experiment that involved 8 subjects in two groups: Mild SAD and No SAD. The experiment consisted on an induced anxiety situation where each participant gave a 10 minutes speech in front of 2 professors. We found higher average heart rates after induced anxiety spans on the mild SAD group. However, we found no evidence of increased SBR as an anxiety indicator. These results indicate that wearable devices can be used to detect anxiety.
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paper_title: Managing Wearable Sensor Data through Cloud Computing

paper_content:

Mobile pervasive healthcare technologies can support a wide range of applications and services including patient monitoring and emergency response. At the same time they introduce several challenges, like data storage and management, interoperability and availability of heterogeneous resources, unified and ubiquitous access issues. One potential solution for addressing all aforementioned issues is the introduction of the Cloud Computing concept. Within this context, in this work we have developed and present a wearable -- textile platform based on open hardware and software that collects motion and heartbeat data and stores them wirelessly on an open Cloud infrastructure for monitoring and further processing. The proposed system may be used to promote the independent living of patient and elderly requiring constant surveillance.
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paper_title: Direction sensitive fall detection using a triaxial accelerometer and a barometric pressure sensor

paper_content:

Falling is one of the leading causes of serious health decline or injury-related deaths in the elderly. For survivors of a fall, the resulting health expenses can be a devastating burden, largely because of the long recovery time and potential comorbidities that ensue. The detection of a fall is, therefore, important in care of the elderly for decreasing the reaction time by the care-givers especially for those in care who are particularly frail or living alone. Recent advances in motion-sensor technology have enabled wearable sensors to be used efficiently for pervasive care of the elderly. In addition to fall detection, it is also important to determine the direction of a fall, which could help in the location of joint weakness or post-fall fracture. This work uses a waist-worn sensor, encompassing a 3D accelerometer and a barometric pressure sensor, for reliable fall detection and the determination of the direction of a fall. Also assessed is an efficient analysis framework suitable for on-node implementation using a low-power micro-controller that involves both feature extraction and fall detection. A detailed laboratory analysis is presented validating the practical application of the system.
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paper_title: Advancetid network based wireless, single PMS for multiple-patient monitoring

paper_content:

Real-time monitoring of the physical condition of the patients is one of the major challenges faced by hospital authorities nowadays. All the hospitals today have one Patient Monitoring System (PMS) per patient. Also human intervention is needed frequently for critical patients. In this paper we propose a network based Wireless Single PMS (NWSPMS), which can monitor multiple patients to measure various physical parameters. This must be precise, fast and effective for transmission of information about their health condition to the concerned. Also there lies a need to transmit more parameters and more data for the convenience and fast response by the staffs in the hospital. Since we need an immediate response, we make use of the voice-call facility apart from the SMS mechanism via an GSM modem. The system proposed here monitors blood pressure, heart beat rate, body temperature and ECG of the elderly patient thus giving an overall condition of the patient.
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paper_title: HOPE: An electronic gadget for home-bound patients and elders

paper_content:

Home-bound patients, mostly elders face many problems regarding their critical health parameter variations and timely assistance in case of emergencies. It is really a malady when they suffer from other severe diseases, heart problems etc. A constant and reliable assistive technology is essential while taking care of home-bound patients. The system, HOPE we have proposed has sensors to monitor the heart rate, body temperature, tilt and fall. The sensors are attached to the body of the elderly patient in a contented manner. The data can be sent to any Smartphone with Bluetooth support. In case of any emergency the caretaker will be given a notification about the critical situation. The provision to monitor the posture of the patient in the bed helps to reduce the cases of bedsore in bedridden elders. Day by day the menace of weakening health and chances of skin related problems, bed sores etc. are becoming critical in case of bed ridden patients. The experimental results presented in this paper give some insight into the behavior of the proposed system.
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paper_title: Data set for fall events and daily activities from inertial sensors

paper_content:

Wearable sensors are becoming popular for remote health monitoring as technology improves and cost reduces. One area in which wearable sensors are increasingly being used is falls monitoring. The elderly, in particular are vulnerable to falls and require continuous monitoring. Indeed, many attempts, with insufficient success have been made towards accurate, robust and generic falls and Activities of Daily Living (ADL) classification. A major challenge in developing solutions for fall detection is access to sufficiently large data sets. This paper presents a description of the data set and the experimental protocols designed by the authors for the simulation of falls, near-falls and ADL. Forty-two volunteers were recruited to participate in an experiment that involved a set of scripted protocols. Four types of falls (forward, backward, lateral left and right) and several ADL were simulated. This data set is intended for the evaluation of fall detection algorithms by combining daily activities and transitions from one posture to another with falls. In our prior work, machine learning based fall detection algorithms were developed and evaluated. Results showed that our algorithm was able to discriminate between falls and ADL with an F-measure of 94%.
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paper_title: Smart Multi-Level Tool for Remote Patient Monitoring Based on a Wireless Sensor Network and Mobile Augmented Reality

paper_content:

Technological innovations in the field of disease prevention and maintenance of patient health have enabled the evolution of fields such as monitoring systems. One of the main advances is the development of real-time monitors that use intelligent and wireless communication technology. In this paper, a system is presented for the remote monitoring of the body temperature and heart rate of a patient by means of a wireless sensor network (WSN) and mobile augmented reality (MAR). The combination of a WSN and MAR provides a novel alternative to remotely measure body temperature and heart rate in real time during patient care. The system is composed of (1) hardware such as Arduino microcontrollers (in the patient nodes), personal computers (for the nurse server), smartphones (for the mobile nurse monitor and the virtual patient file) and sensors (to measure body temperature and heart rate), (2) a network layer using WiFly technology, and (3) software such as LabView, Android SDK, and DroidAR. The results obtained from tests show that the system can perform effectively within a range of 20 m and requires ten minutes to stabilize the temperature sensor to detect hyperthermia, hypothermia or normal body temperature conditions. Additionally, the heart rate sensor can detect conditions of tachycardia and bradycardia.
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paper_title: An integrated system for wireless monitoring of chronic patients and elderly people

paper_content:

In the last years the demographic changes and ageing of population increase health care demand. Increasing number of chronic patients and elders requires close attention to their health conditions. In this paper we present the realization of a wireless monitoring system capable to measure process and transmit patient's physiologic signals (electrocardiogram, respiratory rhythm, arterial saturation of oxygen, blood pressure and body temperature) to a central medical server. The use of our system is suitable for continuous long-time monitoring, as a part of a diagnostic procedure or can achieve medical assistance of a chronic condition. We use custom developed and commercially available devices, low power microcontrollers and RF transceivers that perform the measurements and transmit them to the Personal Server. The Personal Server, in form of a PDA, that running a monitor application, receives the physiological signals from monitoring devices, activates the alarms when the monitored parameters exceed the preset limits, and communicates periodically to the central server by using WiFi or GSM/GPRS connection.
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paper_title: CoolSpots: reducing the power consumption of wireless mobile devices with multiple radio interfaces

paper_content:

CoolSpots enable a wireless mobile device to automatically switch between multiple radio interfaces, such as WiFi and Bluetooth, in order to increase battery lifetime. The main contribution of this work is an exploration of the policies that enable a system to switch among these interfaces, each with diverse radio characteristics and different ranges, in order to save power - supported by detailed quantitative measurements. The system and policies do not require any changes to the mobile applications themselves, and changes required to existing infrastructure are minimal. Results are reported for a suite of commonly used applications, such as file transfer, web browsing, and streaming media, across a range of operating conditions. Experimental validation of the CoolSpot system on a mobile research platform shows substantial energy savings: more than a 50% reduction in energy consumption of the wireless subsystem is possible, with an associated increase in the effective battery lifetime.
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paper_title: Multi-parameters wireless shirt for physiological monitoring

paper_content:

The ability to monitor the health status of elderly patients or patients undergoing home therapy allows significant advantages in terms of cost and convenience of the subject. However, these non-clinical applications of biomedical signals acquisition require different monitoring devices having, between the other characteristics, reduced size, low power and environment compatibility. The research activity concerns the development of a new wearable device that can monitor the main physiological parameters of a person in a non-invasive manner. All sensors have contactless characteristics that permit to avoid the direct contact with the skin. This system is a useful solution for monitoring the health condition of patients at home. The wearable monitoring system consists of two subsystems: first, a wearable data acquisition hardware, in which the sensors are integrated for the acquisition of biomedical parameters, and secondly, a remote monitoring station located separately and connected to the Internet for telemedicine applications. The physiological parameters that are monitored are electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate (HR), derived from ECG signals through the determination of RR intervals, respiratory rate, and three-axis motion (acceleration and position) of the subject measured using an accelerometer. All sensors are designed using contactless measurement techniques, thus avoiding the use of gel for the conduction of the signal and possible skin irritation due to contact. The electrodes for measuring ECG signal are capacitive, while the measure of respiration is obtained by plethysmography, which does not require direct contact with skin. In order to design and construct the signal acquisition circuits in an efficient and simple manner, modular design concept is adopted in this research. The flexible signal conditioning modules are designed and assembled together. The human parameters can be recorded and analyzed continuously during work activities at home. The correct evaluation of these parameters allows the medical staff to assess to the state of health, to know accidental injury or other danger occurred in patients at home.
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paper_title: An Integrated Architecture for Remote Healthcare Monitoring

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Remote healthcare monitoring has attracted the interest of many research projects during last years. The need to address the issue of ageing population has lead to the exploitation of modern communication and software technologies in this domain too. This is instigated by related technological evolutions such as the evolutions in sensor networks which can now support self organization. This paper presents the INCASA architecture that provides advances towards mainly two directions. To start with, by using the appropriate middleware, it manages to transform the network of devices to a network of services following a Service Oriented Architecture. In this way, it turns the implementation of applications (e.g. clinical applications) on top of the middleware to be easy and efficient. Furthermore, INCASA architecture provides an integrated solution for profiling user habits. This is particularly important in case of elderly people who tend to follow daily activities in a repeating manner. In the proposed architecture, the procedure of modeling user habits is the necessary step in order to generate alert actions in case of divergence.
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paper_title: Noise Filtering, Channel Modeling and Energy Utilization in Wireless Body Area Networks

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Constant monitoring of patients without disturbing their daily activities can be achieved through mobile networks. Sensor nodes distributed in a home environment to provide home assistance gives concept of Wireless Wearable Body Area Networks. Gathering useful information and its transmission to the required destination may face several problems. In this paper we figure out different issues and discuss their possible solutions in order to obtain an optimized infrastructure for the care of elderly people. Different channel models along with their characteristics, noise filtering in different equalization techniques, energy consumption and effect of different impairments have been discussed in our paper. The novelty of this work is that we highlighted multiple issues along with their possible solutions that a BAN infrastructure is still facing.
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paper_title: Wireless ECG monitoring and alarm system using ZigBee

paper_content:

This paper presents the development of a system for wireless ECG monitoring and alarm using ZigBee. The system is intended for home use by patients that are not in a critical condition but need to be constant or periodically monitored by clinicians or family. Patient monitoring is the cornerstone of proper medical care. It provides clinicians the much needed information about a person's current health status, so that they can act accordingly if anything goes wrong. Nowadays, complex patient monitoring systems offer the possibility of continuously monitoring a multitude of biological signals, analyze them, interpret them and take the appropriate action; or alert clinicians if necessary [1]. The usual shortcomings of most of these systems reside in affecting patient mobility and home comfort. A patient would need to be sitting on a bed wired to these devices in order for his vital signs to be monitored. This system measures, records and presents in real-time the electrical activity of the heart while preserving comfort of the patient. The device is built as a low-power, small-sized, low-cost solution suitable for monitoring elderly people at home or in a nursing facility without interfering with the daily activity of a patient. It should give sufficient information in real time, and make it available remotely. The intention is not to achieve perfect clinical accuracy but the device is able to detect anomalies in the measured data and it also has alerting features. Authorized observers (clinicians or family) can monitor at any moment the state of the patient through the internet.
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paper_title: A distributed wireless body area network for medical supervision

paper_content:

The emerging of wireless body area network has profound impacts on our daily life, such as pervasive medical supervision and outdoor exercises, and the large scale application of wireless body area network can effectively reduce higher cost burden owing to the aging society and long term healthcare for the chronic illness. It can also enhance the quality of life for elderly people and chronic patients, and decrease the harm of the sudden diseases. The paper presents a distributed wireless body area network for medical supervision. The system contains three layers: sensor network tier, mobile computing network tier, and remote monitoring network tier. It provides collection, demonstration, and storage of the vital information such as ECG, blood oxygen, body temperature, respiration rate. Furthermore, it also provides medical service management and disease warning. The system has many advantages such as comfort, low-cost, low-power, easy configuration, convenient carrying, easy transplantation, real-time reliable data, and friendly human-machine interaction. And then the design and implementation issues of the system composition are discussed in this paper.
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paper_title: Mobile Messaging Services-Based Personal Electrocardiogram Monitoring System

paper_content:

A mobile monitoring system utilizing Bluetooth and mobile messaging services (MMS/SMSs) with low-cost hardware equipment is proposed. A proof of concept prototype has been developed and implemented to enable transmission of an Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and body temperature of a patient, which can be expanded to include other vital signs. Communication between a mobile smart-phone and the ECG and temperature acquisition apparatus is implemented using the popular personal area network standard specification Bluetooth. When utilizing MMS for transmission, the mobile phone plots the received ECG signal and displays the temperature using special application software running on the client mobile phone itself, where the plot can be captured and saved as an image before transmission. Alternatively, SMS can be selected as a transmission means, where in this scenario, dedicated application software is required at the receiving device. The experimental setup can be operated formonitoring from anywhere in the globe covered by a cellular network that offers data services.
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paper_title: Real life applicable fall detection system based on wireless body area network

paper_content:

Real-time health monitoring with wearable sensors is an active area of research. In this domain, observing the physical condition of elderly people or patients in personal environments such as home, office, and restroom has special significance because they might be unassisted in these locations. The elderly people have limited physical abilities and are more vulnerable to serious physical damages even with small accidents, e.g. fall. The falls are unpredictable and unavoidable. In case of a fall, early detection and prompt notification to emergency services is essential for quick recovery. However, the existing fall detection devices are bulky and uncomfortable to wear. Also, detection system using the devices requires the higher computation overhead to detect falls from activities of daily living (ADL). In this paper, we propose a new fall detection system using one sensor node which can be worn as a necklace to provide both the comfortable wearing and low computation overhead. The proposed necklace-shaped sensor node includes tri-axial accelerometer and gyroscope sensors to classify the behaviour and posture of the detection subject. The simulated experimental results performed 5 fall scenarios 50 times by 5 persons show that our proposed detection approach can successfully distinguish between ADL and fall, with sensitivities greater than 80% and specificities of 100%.
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paper_title: Feasibility Study of a Wearable System Based on a Wireless Body Area Network for Gait Assessment in Parkinson's Disease Patients

paper_content:

Parkinson's disease (PD) alters the motor performance of affected individuals. The dopaminergic denervation of the striatum, due to substantia nigra neuronal loss, compromises the speed, the automatism and smoothness of movements of PD patients. The development of a reliable tool for long-term monitoring of PD symptoms would allow the accurate assessment of the clinical status during the different PD stages and the evaluation of motor complications. Furthermore, it would be very useful both for routine clinical care as well as for testing novel therapies. Within this context we have validated the feasibility of using a Body Network Area (BAN) of wireless accelerometers to perform continuous at home gait monitoring of PD patients. The analysis addresses the assessment of the system performance working in real environments.
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paper_title: Leveraging Mobile Cloud for Telemedicine: A Performance Study in Medical Monitoring

paper_content:

Telemedicine has proven to be an effective and promising solution in promoting more affordable and higher quality healthcare. Wearable body sensors and mobile devices have been widely used to monitor health status of patients or elderly and generate alarms in case of imminent medical conditions. However, the limited computation power and energy supply of mobile devices result in either high false alarm rate or short battery life, prohibitive for medical monitoring. Cloud computing embraces new opportunities of transforming healthcare delivery into a more reliable and sustainable manner. In this paper, we propose a mobile cloud telemedicine framework and discuss its potential performance by taking advantage of the real-time, on-site monitoring capability of Android mobile device and the abundant computing power of the cloud.
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paper_title: An Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for Chronic Respiratory and Renal Diseases (CHRONIOUS)

paper_content:

CHRONIOUS is a highly innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) research initiative that aspires to implement its vision for ubiquitous health and lifestyle monitoring of people with chronic diseases at a European level.CHRONIOUS is funded by the European Union under its 7th Framework Program. The project started on February 1st, 2008 and has a planned duration of three years and half. The CHRONIOUS team is a consortium of internationally renowned research labs in Europe, universities and private companies, who collaborate to define a European framework for a generic health status monitoring platform addressing people with chronic health conditions. CHRONIOUS addresses a smart wearable platform, based on multi-parametric sensors processing, for monitoring people suffering from chronic diseases. In particular CHRONIOUS will be tested with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) and renal insufficiency inpatients at their home.
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paper_title: Using physiological signals for authentication in a group key agreement protocol

paper_content:

A Body Area Network (BAN) can be used to monitor the elderly people or patients with chronic diseases. Securing broadcasted data and commands within BANs is essential for preserving the privacy of health data and for ensuring the safety of the patient. We show how a group key can be securely established between the different sensors within a BAN. The proposed mechanism uses the inherent secure environmental values. An implementation of the protocols is carried out on mica2 motes and performance is examined in detail. The time elapsed, complexity of the code and memory requirements are analysed. The results confirm the potential benefits in real-world application. We show that a key establishment protocol based on RSA has advantages over a protocol based on ECC for this application.
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paper_title: Estimation of Basic Activities of Daily Living Using ZigBee 3D Accelerometer Sensor Network

paper_content:

Recently, how to support and care elderly people is serious problem. Modern approach is trying to support to keep health (body and mental) seniors living alone, but it is hard to keep a health by oneself. Our aim is monitoring a user's life for providing suitable services to keep his/her health. To providing suitable service, life log is very useful information. However, traditional monitoring system is only focusing elementary motion, walking, sleeping, and so on. We deal with recognizing advanced motions by using transportation data from an area to other areas in a house. These advanced motion logs support not only elderly but also care stuff or family who plans supports. In daily life, our motion is very variety. Therefore we focused on Basic Activities of Daily Living (ADL) which categories normally doing in daily life such as feeding, bathing, homemaking, and so on. In this research, we pick up 11 motion from ADL for recognition.
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paper_title: Automatic identification and placement verification of wearable wireless sensor nodes using atmospheric air pressure distribution

paper_content:

We present a new approach to identifying and verifying the location of wearable wireless sensor nodes (W2SNs) placed on a body by inferring differences in altitudes using atmospheric air pressure sensors. This technique is aimed at long-term, in-home monitoring applications of the elderly and patients with chronic conditions, where the user has the freedom to install and remove the W2SNs as required without caregiver assistance. Our prototype shows that each IEEE 802.15.4-capable W2SN, employing pressure sensors, is capable of detecting altitude changes sufficient to distinguish between the relative elevation of a patient's arm and leg, and recognize which W2SN is placed on which limb; preliminary results show detection in altitudes down to 39cm apart.
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paper_title: On Power and Throughput Tradeoffs of WiFi and Bluetooth in Smartphones

paper_content:

This paper describes a combined power and throughput performance study of WiFi and Bluetooth usage in smartphones. The work measures the obtained throughput in various settings while employing each of these technologies, and the power consumption level associated with them. In addition, the power requirements of Bluetooth and WiFi in their respective noncommunicating modes are also compared. The study reveals several interesting phenomena and tradeoffs. In particular, the paper identifies many situations in which WiFi is superior to Bluetooth, countering previous reports. The study also identifies a couple of scenarios that are better handled by Bluetooth. The conclusions from this study suggest preferred usage patterns, as well as operative suggestions for researchers and smartphone developers. This includes a cross-layer optimization for TCP/IP that could greatly improve the throughput to power ratio whenever the transmitter is more capable than the receiver.
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paper_title: Wireless sensor network based on multilevel femtocells for home monitoring

paper_content:

An intelligent femtocell-based sensor network is proposed for home monitoring elderly or people with chronic diseases. The femtocell is considered as a small sensor network which is placed into patient house and consists on both mobile and fixed sensors disposed on three layers. The first layer contains body sensors attached to the patient that monitor different health parameters, patient location, position and possible falls. The second layer is dedicated for ambient sensors and routing inside the cell. The third layer contains emergency ambient sensors that cover burglary events or toxic gas concentration, distributed by necessities. Cell implementation is based on IRIS family of motes. In order to reduce energy consumption and radiation level, adaptive rates of acquisition and communication are used. Experimental results on body sensors and ambient ones are presented in the last section.
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paper_title: Assistive Technology for Elders: Wireless Intelligent Healthcare Gadget

paper_content:

Improving the quality of life for the elderly persons and giving them the proper care at the right time is the responsibility of the younger generation. But due to lack of awareness on proper elder care, unavoidable busy schedule etc. the elderly population is seem to be quite ignored. In such a scenario we are trying to find an amicable solution to this problem using a compact and user friendly system design. The proposed system is a compact device which has various wearable sensors all attached inside a glove. It has a process flow controller module and a communication control module. These modules perform together to excite an alert mechanism to the relatives or to the doctors via an SMS or a voice call to their mobile phones, whenever some critical situations arise. The system measures the heart rate, oxygen content in blood, body temperature and the pressure of the elderly person, which are the important parameters for a proper diagnosis.
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paper_title: Synchronous Wearable Wireless Body Sensor Network Composed of Autonomous Textile Nodes

paper_content:

A novel, fully-autonomous, wearable, wireless sensor network is presented, where each flexible textile node performs cooperative synchronous acquisition and distributed event detection. Computationally efficient situational-awareness algorithms are implemented on the low-power microcontroller present on each flexible node. The detected events are wirelessly transmitted to a base station, directly, as well as forwarded by other on-body nodes. For each node, a dual-polarized textile patch antenna serves as a platform for the flexible electronic circuitry. Therefore, the system is particularly suitable for comfortable and unobtrusive integration into garments. In the meantime, polarization diversity can be exploited to improve the reliability and energy-efficiency of the wireless transmission. Extensive experiments in realistic conditions have demonstrated that this new autonomous, body-centric, textile-antenna, wireless sensor network is able to correctly detect different operating conditions of a firefighter during an intervention. By relying on four network nodes integrated into the protective garment, this functionality is implemented locally, on the body, and in real time. In addition, the received sensor data are reliably transferred to a central access point at the command post, for more detailed and more comprehensive real-time visualization. This information provides coordinators and commanders with situational awareness of the entire rescue operation. A statistical analysis of measured on-body node-to-node, as well as off-body person-to-person channels is included, confirming the reliability of the communication system.
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paper_title: Towards a low cost open architecture wearable sensor network for health care applications

paper_content:

Wireless sensor networks present a growing interest in health care applications since they can replace wired devices for detecting signals of physiological origin and continuously monitoring health parameters, offering a reliable and inexpensive solution. In this paper a low cost open architecture wearable sensor network for health care applications is presented. Through this study, an experimental wireless sensor network (WSN) architecture has been built from scratch in order to investigate and present the development procedure and the corresponding capabilities and limitations of such a system. Moreover, technological aspects regarding implementation are also presented.
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paper_title: Processing of wearable sensor data on the cloud - a step towards scaling of continuous monitoring of health and well-being

paper_content:

As part of a sleep monitoring project, we used actigraphy based on body-worn accelerometer sensors to remotely monitor and study the sleep-wake cycle of elderly staying at nursing homes. We have conducted a fifteen patient trial of a sleep activity pattern monitoring (SAPM) system at a local nursing home. The data was collected and stored in our server and the processing of the data was done offline after sleep diaries used for validation and ground truth were updated into the system. The processing algorithm matches and annotates the sensor data with manual sleep diary information and is processed asynchronously on the grid/cloud back end. In this paper we outline the mapping of the system for grid / cloud processing, and initial results that show expected near-linear performance for scaling the number of users.
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paper_title: Emergency Fall Incidents Detection in Assisted Living Environments Utilizing Motion, Sound, and Visual Perceptual Components

paper_content:

This paper presents the implementation details of a patient status awareness enabling human activity interpretation and emergency detection in cases, where the personal health is threatened like elder falls or patient collapses. The proposed system utilizes video, audio, and motion data captured from the patient's body using appropriate body sensors and the surrounding environment, using overhead cameras and microphone arrays. Appropriate tracking techniques are applied to the visual perceptual component enabling the trajectory tracking of persons, while proper audio data processing and sound directionality analysis in conjunction to motion information and subject's visual location can verify fall and indicate an emergency event. The postfall visual and motion behavior of the subject, which indicates the severity of the fall (e.g., if the person remains unconscious or patient recovers) is performed through a semantic representation of the patient's status, context and rules-based evaluation, and advanced classification. A number of advanced classification techniques have been examined in the framework of this study and their corresponding performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency in detecting an emergency situation has been thoroughly assessed.
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paper_title: Monitoring activities of daily living based on wearable wireless body sensor network

paper_content:

With recent advances in microprocessor chip technology, wireless communication, and biomedical engineering it is possible to develop miniaturized ubiquitous health monitoring devices that are capable of recording physiological and movement signals during daily life activities. The aim of the research is to implement and test the prototype of health monitoring system. The system consists of the body central unit with Bluetooth module and wearable sensors: the custom-designed ECG sensor, the temperature sensor, the skin humidity sensor and accelerometers placed on the human body or integrated with clothes and a network gateway to forward data to a remote medical server. The system includes custom-designed transmission protocol and remote web-based graphical user interface for remote real time data analysis. Experimental results for a group of humans who performed various activities (eg. working, running, etc.) showed maximum 5% absolute error compared to certified medical devices. The results are promising and indicate that developed wireless wearable monitoring system faces challenges of multi-sensor human health monitoring during performing daily activities and opens new opportunities in developing novel healthcare services.
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paper_title: Wireless sensor network based E-health system: Implementation and experimental results

paper_content:

With the increasing number senior citizens, E-health is targeted for home use with the special requirements of being usable in everyday life and low cost. A wireless sensor network application is proposed here for 24 hour constant monitoring without disturbing daily activities of elderly people and their caretakers. In the system proposed, both fixed and body (mobile) sensors are used. Since not every elder likes to have a sensor board attached to him/her, and in many cases, he/she may not carry the sensor; the home sensor network independently would have the ability to monitor the health status and living environment based on the multisensor data analysis and fusion. A mixed positioning algorithm is proposed to determine where the elderly person is. The purpose of the positioning is to help the system to determine the person's activities and further to make decisions about his/her health status. The system could take care of two types of the basic needs of an elderly person: everyday needs as abnormal events and emergency alarms to doctors and caretakers through telephone, SMS and e-mail, and day to day requirements such as taking of medicine, having lunch, turn off the microwave oven, and so on. At same time, the system is sensitive to security and privacy issues.
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paper_title: iCare: A Mobile Health Monitoring System for the Elderly

paper_content:

This paper describes a mobile health monitoring system called iCare for the elderly. We use wireless body sensors and smart phones to monitor the well being of the elderly. It can offer remote monitoring for the elderly anytime anywhere and provide tailored services for each person based on their personal health condition. When detecting an emergency, the smart phone will automatically alert pre-assigned people who could be the old people's family and friends, and call the ambulance of the emergency centre. It also acts as the personal health information system and the medical guidance which offers one communication platform and the medical knowledge database so that the family and friends of the served people can cooperate with doctors to take care of him/her. The system also features some unique functions that cater to the living demands of the elderly, including regular reminder, quick alarm, medical guidance, etc. iCare is not only a real-time health monitoring system for the elderly, but also a living assistant which can make their lives more convenient and comfortable.
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Title: A Survey on Wireless Body Area Networks for eHealthcare Systems in Residential Environments

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Introduce the background and motivation for using Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) systems in eHealthcare, especially in the context of an aging population and increasing chronic diseases.

Section 2: Residential Environment eHealthcare System Architecture
Description 2: Describe a typical architecture of a residential environment eHealthcare system, detailing its different layers and components.

Section 3: Taxonomy and Requirements
Description 3: Summarize the primary requirements and design considerations of wireless communication technologies applicable to WBAN systems, covering low power consumption, transmission reliability, latency, data rates, and security.

Section 4: Candidate Wireless Technologies
Description 4: Review the latest wireless communication technologies that support the development and deployment of WBAN systems, including BLE, ZigBee, RuBee, Sensium, Zarlink, Z-Wave, and others.

Section 5: Discussion
Description 5: Highlight important features of low-power communication technologies, discussing their protocol efficiency, user flexibility, communication range, and energy efficiency.

Section 6: Future Prospects
Description 6: Explore the potential future growth areas for WBAN systems in healthcare, focusing on smartphone-based healthcare applications, their advantages, challenges, and fastest-growing mHealth areas.

Section 7: Summary of Recent Research Articles
Description 7: Provide an overview of recent technological advances in eHealthcare systems, focusing on studies that use WBAN for remote patient monitoring and their findings.

Section 8: Conclusions
Description 8: Summarize the key points and findings from the survey, highlighting the challenges, opportunities, and potential solutions in the context of WBAN systems for residential eHealthcare.