An overview of body sensor networks in enabling pervasive healthcare and assistive environments

ABSTRACT

The use of sensor networks for healthcare, well-being, and working in extreme environments has long roots in the engineering sector in medicine and biology community. With the growing needs in ubiquitous communications and recent advances in very-low-power wireless technologies, there has been considerable interest in the development and application of wireless networks around humans. With the maturity of wireless sensor networks, body area networks (BANs), and wireless BANs (WBANs), recent efforts in promoting the concept of body sensor networks (BSNs) aim to move beyond sensor connectivity to adopt a system-level approach to address issues related to biosensor design, interfacing, and embodiment, as well as ultra low-power processing / communication, power scavenging, autonomic sensing, data mining, inferencing, and integrated wireless sensor microsystems. As a result, the system architecture based on WBAN and BSN is becoming a widely accepted method of organization for ambulatory and ubiquitous monitoring systems. This review paper presents an up-to-date report of the current research and enabling applications and addresses some of the challenges and implementation issues.

References

1. E. Jovanov, J. Price, D. Raskovic, K. Kavi, T. Martin, and R. Adhami, "Wireless personal area networks in telemedical environment" in Proc. 3rd IEEE EMBS Inf. Technol. Appl. Biomed.--Workshop Int. Telemed. Inf. Soc. (ITAB ITIS 2000), Arlington, VA, Nov. 2000, pp. 22--27.
2. T. G. Zimmerman, "Personal Area Networks: Near-field intrabody communication," IBM Syst. J., vol. 35, no. 3--4, pp. 609--617, 1996.
3. B. Heile, I. Gifford, and T. Siep, "The IEEE P802.15 working group for wireless personal area networks," IEEE Netw., vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 4--5, Jul. 1999.
4. K. van Dam, S. Pitchers, and M. Barnard, "From PAN to BAN: Why body area networks," presented at the Wireless World Res. Forum 2, Helsinki, Finland, May 10--11, 2001.
5. R. Schmidt, T. Norgall, J. Morsdorf, J. Bernhard, and T. von der Grun, "Body area network BAN-a key infrastructure element for patient-centered medical applications," Biomed. Tech. (Berl.), vol. 47, pp. 365--368, 2002.
6. A. Van Halteren, R. Bults, K. Wac, N. Dokovsky, G. Koprinkov, I. Widya, D. Konstantas, V. Jones, and R. Herzog, "Wireless body area networks for healthcare: The Mobi-Health project," in Wearable e-Health Systems for Personalised Health Management: State of the Art and Future Challenges, vol. 108, Amster., The Netherland: IOS Press, 2004.
7. R. S. H. Istepanian, E. Jovanov, and Y. T. Zhang, "Guest editorial introduction to the special section on M-health: Beyond seamless mobility and global wireless health-care connectivity," IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Biomed., vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 405--414, Dec. 2004.
8. G. Z. Yang, Body Sensor Networks. London, U.K.: Springer-Verlag, 2006.
9. D. Panescu, "Implantable neurostimulation devices," IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Mag., vol. 27, no. 5, pp. 100--113, Sep.--Oct. 2008.
10. C. C. Y. Poon, Y. T. Zhang, and S. D. Bao, "A novel biometrics method to secure wireless body area sensor networks for telemedicine and m-Health," IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 73--81, Apr. 2006.
11. C. H. Chan, C. C. Y. Poon, R. C. S. Wong, and Y. T. Zhang, "A hybrid body sensor network for continuous and long-term measurement of arterial blood pressure," in Proc. 4th IEEE-EMBS Int. Summer School Symp. Med. Devices Biosens., Cambridge, U.K., Aug. 19--22, 2007, pp. 121--123.
12. P. J. Xu, H. Zhang, and X. M. Tao, "Textile-Structured Electrodes for Electrocardiogram", Textile Progress, vol.40, no. 4, Dec. 2008, pp. 183--213.
13. P. S. Hall and Y. Hao, Antennas and Propagation for Body-Centric Wireless Communications, Artech House, 2006.
14. J. A. Ruiz and S. Shimamoto, "Novel Communication Services Based on Human Body and Environment Interaction: Applications inside Trains and Applications for Handicapped People", Proc. IEEE WCNC 2006, Las Vegas, NV, 2006.
15. K. Takizawa, T. Aoyagi, and R. Kohno, "Channel Modeling and Performance Evaluation of UWB-based Wireless Body Area Networks", Proc. IEEE ICC 2009, Dresden, Ger., 2009.
16. R. Istepanian, S. Laxminarayan, and C. S. Pattichis, M-Health: Emerging Mobile Health Systems, Springer, 2005.
17. V. Shnayder et al., "Sensor Networks for Medical Care", Harvard Univ. tech. rep. TR-08-05, Apr. 2005.
18. T. Gao et al., "The Advanced Health and Disaster Aid Network: A Lightweight Wireless Medical System for Triage", IEEE Trans. Biomedical Circuits and Sys., vol. 1, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 203--16.
19. M. C. Munshiet al., "Wireless ECG Plaster for Body Sensor Network", Proc. 5th Int'l. Wksp. Wearable and Implantable Body Sensor Net., Hong Kong, China, 2008.
20. A. Wong, D. McDonagh, O. Omeni, C. Nunn, M. Silveira, and A. Burdett, "Sensium: An ultra-low-power wireless body sensor network platform: Design & application challenges," Proc. 31th Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Soc., Minneapolis, MN, Sep. 2--6, 2009, pp. 6576--6579.
21. J. Kwong, Y. K. Ramadass, N. Verma, and A. P. Chandrakasan, "A 65 nm sub-V_t microcontroller with integrated SRAM and switched capacitor DC--DC converter," IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 115--126, Jan. 2009.
22. V. Leonov, B. Gyselinckx, C. Van Hoof, T. Torfs, F. Yazicioglu, R. J. M. Vullers, and P. Fiorini, "Wearable self-powered wireless devices with thermoelectric energy scavengers," in Proc. Conf. Smart Syst. Integr., Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 9--10, 2008, pp. 217--224.
23. M. J. Cooney, V. Svoboda, C. Lau, G. Martina, and S. D. Minteer, "Enzyme catalysed biofuel cells," Energy Environ. Sci., vol. 1, pp. 320--337, 2008.
24. R. Paradiso, G. Loriga, and N. Taccini, "A wearable health care system based on knitted integrated sensors," IEEE Trans. Inf. Tech. Bio., vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 337--344, Sep. 2005.
25. J. Yoo, L. Yan, S. Lee, H. Kim, and H. J. Yoo, "A wearable ECG acquisition system with compact planar-fashionable circuit board based shirt," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Bio-medicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
26. M. S. Wegmueller, A. Kuhn, J. Froehlich, M. Oberle, N. Felber, N. Kuster, and W. Fichtner, "An attempt to model the human body as a communication channel," IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng., vol. 54, no. 10, pp. 1851--1857, Oct. 2007.
27. E. Reusens, W. Joseph, B. Latre, B. Braem, G. Vermeeren, L. Martens, I. Moerman, and C. Blondia, "Characterization of on-body communication channel and energy efficient topology design for wireless body area networks," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomed., Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
28. Y. T. Zhang, C. C. Y. Poon, and E. MacPherson, "Editorial note on health informatics," IEEE Trans. Inf. Technol. Bio-med., vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 281--283, May 2009.
29. G. Roessler, T. Laube, C. Brockmann, T. Kirschkamp, B. Mazinani, M. Goertz, C. Koch, I. Krisch, B. Sellhaus, H. K. Trieu, J. Weis, N. Bornfeld, H. Rothgen, A. Messner, W. Mokwa, and P. Walter, "Implantation and explanation of a wireless epiretinal retina implant device: Observations during the EPIRET3 prospective clinical trial," Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci., vol. 50, no. 6, pp. 3003--3008, Jun. 2009.
30. A. Milenkovic, C. Otto, and E. Jovanov, "Wireless Sensor Networks for Personal Health Monitoring: Issues and an Implementation", Comp. Commun., vol. 29, no. 13--14, Aug. 2006, pp. 2521--33.
31. J. A. Ruiz and S. Shimamoto, "Novel Communication Services Based on Human Body and Environment Interaction: Applications inside Trains and Applications for Handicapped People", Proc. IEEE WCNC 2006, Las Vegas, NV, 2006.
32. S. Pentland, "Healthwear: Medical Technology Becomes Wearable", Computer, vol. 37, no. 5, May 2004, pp.42--49.
33. I. Jantunen et al., "Smart Sensor Architecture for Mobile-Terminal-Centric Ambient Intelligence", Sensors and Actuators A: Physical, vol. 142, no.1, Mar. 2004, pp. 352--60.
34. E. Farella et al., "Interfacing Human and Computer with Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks: The WiMoCA Solution", Mult Tools App., vol. 38, no. 3, July 2008, pp. 337--63.
35. S. Patel, K. Lorincz, R. Hughes, N. Huggins, J. Growdon, D. Standaert, M. Akay, J. Dy, M. Welsh, and P. Bonato, "Monitoring motor fluctuations in patients with Parkinson's disease using wearable sensors," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Bio-medicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
36. M. A. Estudillo-Valderrama, L. M. Roa, J. Reina-Tosina, and D. Naranjo- Hernandez, "Design and implementation of a distributed fall detection system," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomedicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
37. S. Vogel, M. Hulsbusch, T. Hennig, V. Blazek, and S. Leonhardt, "IN-EAR vital signs monitoring using a novel microoptic reflective sensor," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Bio-medicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
38. J. Boyle, N. Bidargaddi, A. Sarela, and M. Karunanithi, "Automatic detection of respiration rate from ambulatory single lead ECG," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomedi-cine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
39. D. Raskovic and D. Giessel, "Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for on-demand performance and availability of biomedical embedded systems," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomedicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
40. T. Tamura, "A wearable airbag to prevent fall injuries," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Bio, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
41. S. J. Marinkovic, E. M. Popovici, C. Spagnol, S. Faul, and W. P. Marnane, "Energy-efficient low duty cycle MAC protocol for wireless body area networks," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomedicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
42. C. C. Tan, H. Wang, S. Zhong, and Q. Li, "IBE-lite: A lightweight identity based cryptography for body sensor networks," IEEE Trans. On Inf. Tech. in Biomedicine, Vol. 13, No. 6, November 2009.
43. Y. P. Zhang, L. Bin, and C. Qi, "Characterization of On-Human-Body UWB Radio Propagation Channel", Microwave Optical Tech. Lett., vol. 49, no. 6, pp.1365--71.
44. J.-Y. Yu, W.-C. Liao, and C.-Y. Lee, "A MT-CDMA based Wireless Body Area Network for Ubiquitous Healthcare Monitoring", Proc. BioCAS 2006, Nov. 2006, pp.98--101.
45. A. Kurs et al., "Wireless Power Transfer via Strongly Coupled Magnetic Resonances", Science, vol. 317, no. 5834, July 2007, pp. 83--86.
46. S. Warren and E. Jovanov, "The Need for Rules of Engagement Applied to Wireless Body Area Networks", Proc. IEEE CCNC 2006, Las Vegas, NV, 2006.
47. Charalampos Doukas, Ilias Maglogiannis, "Advanced Classification and Rules-Based Evaluation of Motion, Visual and Biosignal Data for Patient Fall Incident Detection", to be published in Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Pervasive Computing, International Journal on AI Tools (IJAIT), World Scientific Press.
48. C. Doukas, I. Maglogiannis, A. Rouskas, and A. Pneumatikakis, "Emergency Incidents Detection in Assisted Living Environments Utilizing Sound and Visual Perceptual Components", in Proc. of PETRAE 2009 conf., Corfu, Greece.
49. Charalampos Doukas, Lampros Athanasiou, Kostantinos Fakos, Ilias Maglogiannis, "Advanced Sound and Distress Speech Expression Classification for Human Status Awareness in Assistive Environments", The Journal on Information Technology in Healthcare, 2009, 7 (2), pp. 111--117.
50. Charalampos Doukas and Ilias Maglogiannis, "Intelligent Pervasive Healthcare Systems", in Advanced Computational Intelligence Paradigms in Healthcare -- 3 Series: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer Eds. Vol. 107, 2008, pp. 95--115, Hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-540-77661-1
51. N. S. Samaras, C. Chaikalis and G. Siafakas, "Healthcare oriented smart house for elderly or disabled people: A case study", Chapter in book entitled: "Wireless Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living and Health Care: Systems and Applications", Editors: Dr A. Lazakidou, Dr K. Siassiakos and Dr K. Ioannou, IGI Global Publishers, USA (to be published in 2010).

Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Life and medical sciences

    • Health care information systems