An overview of body sensor networks in enabling perva-sive healthcare and assistive environments

Abstract

The use of sensor networks for healthcare, well-being, and work-ing 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), re-cent efforts in promoting the concept of body sensor networks (BSNs) aim to move beyond sensor connectivity to adopt a sys-tem-level approach to address issues related to biosensor design, interfacing, and embodiment, as well as ultra low-power process-ing / 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 ambula-tory and ubiquitous monitoring systems. This review paper pre-sents an up-to-date report of the current research and enabling applications and addresses some of the challenges and implemen-tation issues. Copyright © 2010 ACM.