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Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2018) | Viewed by 127154

Special Issue Editors

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, Dartmouth, MA 02747, USA
Interests: wireless body area network; IoT; connected health; multimedia communication
School of Communication and Information Engineering, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing 400065, China
Interests: wireless body area network; wireless networks; privacy and security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Rapid development of wireless body area networks has significantly grown many mobile healthcare applications worldwide. Applying the Internet, sensors, communication and intelligent techniques to healthcare applications, which are defined as connected health, could significantly improve human wellbeing and reduce the overall healthcare cost. Connected health brings together multidisciplinary technologies to implement preventive or proactive healthcare by connecting devices and persons and build up the healthcare ecosystem. On the other hand, although connected health technologies could enable better health care and personalized medicine, there are still a number of challenges to be addressed to enable many applications worldwide. These challenges are not only from the technical aspects, but also from the clinical trials and health policies. Prospective authors are cordially invited to submit their original contributions related to wireless body area networks and/or the connected health to this Special Issue.

This Special Issue expects innovative work to explore new frontiers and challenges in the field of wireless body area networks and smart connected health research, including both networking and communication techniques, sensor design, resource management, security and privacy, decision support system (e.g., machine learning) and  clinical trials,  connected applications and services.

The particular topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Connected architectures and framework
  • Wearable Technology
  • Wireless body area networks
  • Biomedical sensor design
  • Device-to-Device communications for connected health
  • Smart Connected Health
  • Deep learning for connected health
  • Data Analytics for connected health
  • Low-power design for wearable sensors
  • Policies and rules for connected health
  • Computational intelligence for connected health
  • Data-mining for Connected health
  • Security and privacy-preserving for connected health
  • Blockchain for connected health
  • Body area network applications
  • Clinical trial and practices
  • System validation for connected health

Prof. Honggang Wang
Prof. Dapeng Wu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Smart and Connected Health
  • Wireless body area networks
  • Mobile health
  • Sensing and Data analytics
  • Security and privacy
  • Machine Learning

Published Papers (21 papers)

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17 pages, 1605 KiB  
Article
Chain Modeling of Molecular Communications for Body Area Network
by Peng He, Xiaojuan Han and Hanyong Liu
Sensors 2019, 19(2), 395; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19020395 - 18 Jan 2019
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3239
Abstract
Molecular communications provide an attractive opportunity to precisely regulate biological signaling in nano-medicine applications of body area networks. In this paper, we utilize molecular communication tools to interpret how neural signals are generated in response to external stimuli. First, we propose a chain [...] Read more.
Molecular communications provide an attractive opportunity to precisely regulate biological signaling in nano-medicine applications of body area networks. In this paper, we utilize molecular communication tools to interpret how neural signals are generated in response to external stimuli. First, we propose a chain model of molecular communication system by considering three types of biological signaling through different communication media. Second, communication models of hormonal signaling, Ca 2 + signaling and neural signaling are developed based on existing knowledge. Third, an amplify-and-forward relaying mechanism is proposed to connect different types of signaling. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed communication system facilitates the information exchange between the neural system and nano-machines, and suggests that proper adjustment can optimize the communication system performance. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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21 pages, 4014 KiB  
Article
General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement
by Antonio Benítez-Guijarro, Ángel Ruiz-Zafra, Zoraida Callejas, Nuria Medina-Medina, Kawtar Benghazi and Manuel Noguera
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 108; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010108 - 30 Dec 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 4129
Abstract
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition knowledge and the [...] Read more.
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays, many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy intake as well as users’ physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day. However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture, we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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22 pages, 4657 KiB  
Article
Empirical Study and Improvement on Deep Transfer Learning for Human Activity Recognition
by Renjie Ding, Xue Li, Lanshun Nie, Jiazhen Li, Xiandong Si, Dianhui Chu, Guozhong Liu and Dechen Zhan
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 57; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010057 - 24 Dec 2018
Cited by 50 | Viewed by 4582
Abstract
Human activity recognition (HAR) based on sensor data is a significant problem in pervasive computing. In recent years, deep learning has become the dominating approach in this field, due to its high accuracy. However, it is difficult to make accurate identification for the [...] Read more.
Human activity recognition (HAR) based on sensor data is a significant problem in pervasive computing. In recent years, deep learning has become the dominating approach in this field, due to its high accuracy. However, it is difficult to make accurate identification for the activities of one individual using a model trained on data from other users. The decline on the accuracy of recognition restricts activity recognition in practice. At present, there is little research on the transferring of deep learning model in this field. This is the first time as we known, an empirical study was carried out on deep transfer learning between users with unlabeled data of target. We compared several widely-used algorithms and found that Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) method is most suitable for HAR. We studied the distribution of features generated from sensor data. We improved the existing method from the aspect of features distribution with center loss and get better results. The observations and insights in this study have deepened the understanding of transfer learning in the activity recognition field and provided guidance for further research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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20 pages, 11126 KiB  
Article
Towards Inertial Sensor Based Mobile Gait Analysis: Event-Detection and Spatio-Temporal Parameters
by Wolfgang Teufl, Michael Lorenz, Markus Miezal, Bertram Taetz, Michael Fröhlich and Gabriele Bleser
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 38; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010038 - 22 Dec 2018
Cited by 82 | Viewed by 7770
Abstract
The aim of this study was to assess the validity and test-retest reliability of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) system for gait analysis. Twenty-four healthy subjects conducted a 6-min walking test and were instrumented with seven IMUs and retroreflective markers. A kinematic approach [...] Read more.
The aim of this study was to assess the validity and test-retest reliability of an inertial measurement unit (IMU) system for gait analysis. Twenty-four healthy subjects conducted a 6-min walking test and were instrumented with seven IMUs and retroreflective markers. A kinematic approach was used to estimate the initial and terminal contact events in real-time. Based on these events twelve spatio-temporal parameters (STP) were calculated. A marker based optical motion capture (OMC) system provided the reference. Event-detection rate was about 99%. Detection offset was below 0.017 s. Relative root mean square error (RMSE) ranged from 0.90% to 4.40% for most parameters. However, the parameters that require spatial information of both feet showed higher errors. Step length showed a relative RMSE of 6.69%. Step width and swing width revealed the highest relative RMSE (34.34% and 35.20%). Test-retest results ranged from 0.67 to 0.92, except for the step width (0.25). Summarizing, it appears that the parameters describing the lateral distance between the feet need further improvement. However, the results of the validity and reliability of the IMU system encourage its validation in clinical settings as well as further research. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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21 pages, 2620 KiB  
Article
An Internet-of-Things (IoT) Network System for Connected Safety and Health Monitoring Applications
by Fan Wu, Taiyang Wu and Mehmet Rasit Yuce
Sensors 2019, 19(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19010021 - 21 Dec 2018
Cited by 183 | Viewed by 17669
Abstract
This paper presents a hybrid wearable sensor network system towards the Internet of Things (IoT) connected safety and health monitoring applications. The system is aimed at improving safety in the outdoor workplace. The proposed system consists of a wearable body area network (WBAN) [...] Read more.
This paper presents a hybrid wearable sensor network system towards the Internet of Things (IoT) connected safety and health monitoring applications. The system is aimed at improving safety in the outdoor workplace. The proposed system consists of a wearable body area network (WBAN) to collect user data and a low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) to connect the WBAN with the Internet. The wearable sensors in the WBAN are exerted to measure the environmental conditions around the subject using a Safe Node and monitor the vital signs of the subject using a Health Node. A standalone local server (gateway), which can process the raw sensor signals, display the environmental and physiological data, and trigger an alert if any emergency circumstance is detected, is designed within the proposed network. To connect the gateway with the Internet, an IoT cloud server is implemented to provide more functionalities, such as web monitoring and mobile applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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11 pages, 6420 KiB  
Article
Feasibility Analysis on the Use of Ultrasonic Communications for Body Sensor Networks
by Meina Li and Youn Tae Kim
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4496; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124496 - 19 Dec 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4419
Abstract
Ultrasonic waves have good propagation in the human body and have been widely applied in biomedical device design without any reported side effects. Therefore, ultrasonic waves can provide an alternative method as an information carrier for body sensor networks (BSNs). This paper presents [...] Read more.
Ultrasonic waves have good propagation in the human body and have been widely applied in biomedical device design without any reported side effects. Therefore, ultrasonic waves can provide an alternative method as an information carrier for body sensor networks (BSNs). This paper presents a novel wireless communication method that uses ultrasonic sound waves as a medium for healthcare systems. We investigated the feasibility of our proposal by testing it in a real digital communication experimental setup. To find an acceptable modulation method, the functionality of the proposed ultrasound-based digital communication approach was tested involving three principal modulation methods: amplitude shift keying (ASK), frequency shift keying (FSK), and phase shift keying (PSK). The modulated digital signals obtained from the experiments were compared with the simulated signals. Analysis of the results shows that ultrasonic waves are feasible and can be used for digital communication. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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15 pages, 3378 KiB  
Article
A Software Defined Radio Evaluation Platform for WBAN Systems
by Junchao Wang, Kaining Han, Zhiyu Chen, Anastasios Alexandridis, Zeljko Zilic, Yu Pang and Jinzhao Lin
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4494; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124494 - 19 Dec 2018
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 5167
Abstract
In recent years, the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) concept has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. WBAN specifies a network dedicated to collecting personal biomedical data from advanced sensors that are then used for health and lifestyle purposes. In 2012, the 802.15.6 [...] Read more.
In recent years, the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) concept has attracted significant academic and industrial attention. WBAN specifies a network dedicated to collecting personal biomedical data from advanced sensors that are then used for health and lifestyle purposes. In 2012, the 802.15.6 WBAN standard was released by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which regulates and specifies the configurations of WBAN. Compared to the prevailing wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth and ZigBee, the WBAN standard has the advantages of ultra-low power consumption, high reliability, and high-security protection while transmitting sensitive personal data. Based on the standard specification, several implementations have been published. However, in terms of evaluation, different designs were implemented in proprietary evaluation environments, which may lead to unfair comparison. In this paper, a Software-Defined Radio (SDR) evaluation platform for WBAN systems is proposed to evaluate the RF channel specified in the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. A narrowband communication protocol demonstration with a security scheme in WBAN has been performed to successfully validate the design in the proposed evaluation platform. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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19 pages, 1414 KiB  
Article
Relay-Assisted D2D Transmission for Mobile Health Applications
by Hongcheng Huang, Wei Xiang, Yang Tao, Biao Liu and Min Hu
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4417; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124417 - 13 Dec 2018
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2808
Abstract
Relay-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, one of the important transmission modes in mobile health systems, can provide high transmission quality for servicing users at the edge of system coverage. However, the quality of the D2D relay communication is largely limited by the relay nodes. [...] Read more.
Relay-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, one of the important transmission modes in mobile health systems, can provide high transmission quality for servicing users at the edge of system coverage. However, the quality of the D2D relay communication is largely limited by the relay nodes. When a poor node is selected to assist the source node in the data transmission, it is likely to result in the loss of medical data and inaccurate transmission. Therefore, this paper focuses on how to select relay modes and relay nodes to improve the reliability of medical data transmission. Firstly, in order to eliminate the relay nodes with low energy or poor willingness, the acceptable energy consumption metric of relay nodes is proposed in this paper. The relay mode of each relay node is determined by the acceptable energy consumption metric, which can ensure the physical reliability of the relay communication links. Then a trust metric is proposed to measure the social reliability of each relay link, further excluding the malicious relay nodes. Finally, this paper proposes a relay selection algorithm based on compromise factors (RSCF). With the help of the proposed algorithm, the reliability of the relay communication can be guaranteed, and the spectrum efficiency can be promoted greatly. The simulation results show that the relay nodes selected by RSCF algorithm can greatly improve transmission rate and reliability compared with the traditional relay-assisted D2D communication schemes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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24 pages, 4880 KiB  
Article
Experimental Phantom-Based Security Analysis for Next-Generation Leadless Cardiac Pacemakers
by Muhammad Faheem Awan, Sofia Perez-Simbor, Concepcion Garcia-Pardo, Kimmo Kansanen and Narcis Cardona
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4327; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124327 - 07 Dec 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 3769
Abstract
With technological advancement, implanted medical devices can treat a wide range of chronic diseases such as cardiac arrhythmia, deafness, diabetes, etc. Cardiac pacemakers are used to maintain normal heart rhythms. The next generation of these pacemakers is expected to be completely wireless, providing [...] Read more.
With technological advancement, implanted medical devices can treat a wide range of chronic diseases such as cardiac arrhythmia, deafness, diabetes, etc. Cardiac pacemakers are used to maintain normal heart rhythms. The next generation of these pacemakers is expected to be completely wireless, providing new security threats. Thus, it is critical to secure pacemaker transmissions between legitimate nodes from a third party or an eavesdropper. This work estimates the eavesdropping risk and explores the potential of securing transmissions between leadless capsules inside the heart and the subcutaneous implant under the skin against external eavesdroppers by using physical-layer security methods. In this work, we perform phantom experiments to replicate the dielectric properties of the human heart, blood, and fat for channel modeling between in-body-to-in-body devices and from in-body-to-off-body scenario. These scenarios reflect the channel between legitimate nodes and that between a legitimate node and an eavesdropper. In our case, a legitimate node is a leadless cardiac pacemaker implanted in the right ventricle of a human heart transmitting to a legitimate receiver, which is a subcutaneous implant beneath the collar bone under the skin. In addition, a third party outside the body is trying to eavesdrop the communication. The measurements are performed for ultrawide band (UWB) and industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands. By using these channel models, we analyzed the risk of using the concept of outage probability and determine the eavesdropping range in the case of using UWB and ISM frequency bands. Furthermore, the probability of positive secrecy capacity is also determined, along with outage probability of a secrecy rate, which are the fundamental parameters in depicting the physical-layer security methods. Here, we show that path loss follows a log-normal distribution. In addition, for the ISM frequency band, the probability of successful eavesdropping for a data rate of 600 kbps (Electromyogram (EMG)) is about 97.68% at an eavesdropper distance of 1.3 m and approaches 28.13% at an eavesdropper distance of 4.2 m, whereas for UWB frequency band the eavesdropping risk approaches 0.2847% at an eavesdropper distance of 0.22 m. Furthermore, the probability of positive secrecy capacity is about 44.88% at eavesdropper distance of 0.12 m and approaches approximately 97% at an eavesdropper distance of 0.4 m for ISM frequency band, whereas for UWB, the same statistics are 96.84% at 0.12 m and 100% at 0.4 m. Moreover, the outage probability of secrecy capacity is also determined by using a fixed secrecy rate. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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26 pages, 1431 KiB  
Article
Joint Transmission Power Control and Relay Cooperation for WBAN Systems
by Hongyun Zhang, Farzad Safaei and Le Chung Tran
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4283; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124283 - 05 Dec 2018
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 3752
Abstract
Improving transmission reliability is a crucial challenge for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) because of the instability of channel conditions and the stringent Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) requirement for many WBANs applications. On the other hand, limited by the size of WBAN nodes, [...] Read more.
Improving transmission reliability is a crucial challenge for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) because of the instability of channel conditions and the stringent Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) requirement for many WBANs applications. On the other hand, limited by the size of WBAN nodes, the energy consumption of WBAN nodes should be minimized. In this paper, we jointly consider transmission power control, dynamic slot scheduling and two-hop cooperative mechanism and propose an Autocorrelation-based Adaptive Transmission (AAT) scheme that achieves a better trade-off between transmission reliability and energy consumption for WBAN systems. The new scheme is designed to be compatible with IEEE 802.15.6. We evaluated the performance of the newly proposed scheme by importing the real channel datasets into our simulation model. Simulation results demonstrate that the AAT method can effectively improve the transmission reliability while reducing the energy consumption. We also provide the performance evaluation from three perspectives, namely packet error ratio, energy consumption and energy efficiency, and provide recommendations on the application of the two-hop cooperative mechanism associated with the proposed AAT in the contexts of WBANs. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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15 pages, 962 KiB  
Article
Kinematic and Kinetic Patterns Related to Free-Walking in Parkinson’s Disease
by Martín Martínez, Federico Villagra, Juan Manuel Castellote and María A. Pastor
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4224; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124224 - 01 Dec 2018
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3875
Abstract
The aim of this study is to compare the properties of free-walking at a natural pace between mild Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients during the ON-clinical status and two control groups. In-shoe pressure-sensitive insoles were used to quantify the temporal and force characteristics of [...] Read more.
The aim of this study is to compare the properties of free-walking at a natural pace between mild Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients during the ON-clinical status and two control groups. In-shoe pressure-sensitive insoles were used to quantify the temporal and force characteristics of a 5-min free-walking in 11 PD patients, in 16 young healthy controls, and in 12 age-matched healthy controls. Inferential statistics analyses were performed on the kinematic and kinetic parameters to compare groups’ performances, whereas feature selection analyses and automatic classification were used to identify the signature of parkinsonian gait and to assess the performance of group classification, respectively. Compared to healthy subjects, the PD patients’ gait pattern presented significant differences in kinematic parameters associated with bilateral coordination but not in kinetics. Specifically, patients showed an increased variability in double support time, greater gait asymmetry and phase deviation, and also poorer phase coordination. Feature selection analyses based on the ReliefF algorithm on the differential parameters in PD patients revealed an effect of the clinical status, especially true in double support time variability and gait asymmetry. Automatic classification of PD patients, young and senior subjects confirmed that kinematic predictors produced a slightly better classification performance than kinetic predictors. Overall, classification accuracy of groups with a linear discriminant model which included the whole set of features (i.e., demographics and parameters extracted from the sensors) was 64.1%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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24 pages, 6990 KiB  
Article
A Comparative Study of On-Body Radio-Frequency Links in the 420 MHz–2.4 GHz Range
by Arno Thielens, Robin Benarrouch, Stijn Wielandt, Matthew G. Anderson, Ali Moin, Andreia Cathelin and Jan M. Rabaey
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4165; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124165 - 27 Nov 2018
Cited by 22 | Viewed by 5388
Abstract
While there exists a wide variety of radio frequency (RF) technologies amenable for usage in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which have been studied separately before, it is currently still unclear how their performance compares in true on-body scenarios. In this paper, a [...] Read more.
While there exists a wide variety of radio frequency (RF) technologies amenable for usage in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), which have been studied separately before, it is currently still unclear how their performance compares in true on-body scenarios. In this paper, a single reference on-body scenario—that is, propagation along the arm—is used to experimentally compare six distinct RF technologies (between 420 MHz and 2.4 GHz) in terms of path loss. To further quantify on-body path loss, measurements for five different on-body scenarios are presented as well. To compensate for the effect of often large path losses, two mitigation strategies to (dynamically) improve on-body links are introduced and experimentally verified: beam steering using a phased array, and usage of on-body RF repeaters. The results of this study can serve as a tool for WBAN designers to aid in the selection of the right RF frequency and technology for their application. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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14 pages, 706 KiB  
Article
Secrecy Capacity of a Class of Erasure Wiretap Channels in WBAN
by Bin Wang, Jun Deng, Yanjing Sun, Wangmei Guo and Guiguo Feng
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4135; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124135 - 26 Nov 2018
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2220
Abstract
In wireless body area networks (WBANs), the secrecy of personal health information is vulnerable to attacks due to the openness of wireless communication. In this paper, we study the security problem of WBANs, where there exists an attacker or eavesdropper who is able [...] Read more.
In wireless body area networks (WBANs), the secrecy of personal health information is vulnerable to attacks due to the openness of wireless communication. In this paper, we study the security problem of WBANs, where there exists an attacker or eavesdropper who is able to observe data from part of sensors. The legitimate communication within the WBAN is modeled as a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) by establishing the secrecy capacity of a class of finite state Markov erasure wiretap channels. Meanwhile, the tapping of the eavesdropper is modeled as a finite-state Markov erasure channel (FSMEC). A pair of encoder and decoder are devised to make the eavesdropper have no knowledge of the source message, and enable the receiver to recover the source message with a small decoding error. It is proved that the secrecy capacity can be achieved by migrating the coding scheme for wiretap channel II with the noisy main channel. This method provides a new idea solving the secure problem of the internet of things (IoT). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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20 pages, 6872 KiB  
Article
Performance Evaluation of a Quality of Service Control Scheme in Multi-Hop WBAN Based on IEEE 802.15.6
by Kento Takabayashi, Hirokazu Tanaka, Chika Sugimoto, Katsumi Sakakibara and Ryuji Kohno
Sensors 2018, 18(11), 3969; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113969 - 15 Nov 2018
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3125
Abstract
The performance of a quality of service (QoS) control scheme in a multi-hop wireless body area network (WBAN) based on the IEEE Std. 802.15.6 is evaluated. In medical Internet of Things systems, WBANs are an important technology. In a previous study, an optimal [...] Read more.
The performance of a quality of service (QoS) control scheme in a multi-hop wireless body area network (WBAN) based on the IEEE Std. 802.15.6 is evaluated. In medical Internet of Things systems, WBANs are an important technology. In a previous study, an optimal quality of service control scheme that employs a multiplexing layer for priority scheduling and a decomposable error control coding scheme for WBANs were proposed. However, the two-hop extension supported by IEEE Std.802.15.6 has not been considered. Here, the two-hop extension is applied. Then, the packet error ratio, number of transmissions, and energy efficiency of our previously proposed system are compared to a standard scheme under several conditions. Also, novel evaluations based on communication distance are conducted. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme, in which coding rates change relative to channel conditions, outperforms standard schemes in many aspects. In addition, those systems show the best performance when the communication distance of the first hop equals that of the second hop. In addition, the above result is theoretically clarified. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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19 pages, 3198 KiB  
Article
Critical Data-Based Incremental Cooperative Communication for Wireless Body Area Network
by Hameed Al-Mishmish, Ahmed Alkhayyat, Hasliza A. Rahim, Dalal A. Hammood, R. Badlishah Ahmad and Qammer H. Abbasi
Sensors 2018, 18(11), 3661; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113661 - 28 Oct 2018
Cited by 34 | Viewed by 4018
Abstract
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are single-hop network systems, where sensors gather the body’s vital signs and send them directly to master nodes (MNs). The sensors are distributed in or on the body. Therefore, body posture, clothing, muscle movement, body temperature, and climatic [...] Read more.
Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are single-hop network systems, where sensors gather the body’s vital signs and send them directly to master nodes (MNs). The sensors are distributed in or on the body. Therefore, body posture, clothing, muscle movement, body temperature, and climatic conditions generally influence the quality of the wireless link between sensors and the destination. Hence, in some cases, single hop transmission (‘direct transmission’) is not sufficient to deliver the signals to the destination. Therefore, we propose an emergency-based cooperative communication protocol for WBAN, named Critical Data-based Incremental Cooperative Communication (CD-ICC), based on the IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA standard but assuming a lognormal shadowing channel model. In this paper, a complete study of a system model is inspected in the terms of the channel path loss, the successful transmission probability, and the outage probability. Then a mathematical model is derived for the proposed protocol, end-to-end delay, duty cycle, and average power consumption. A new back-off time is proposed within CD-ICC, which ensures the best relays cooperate in a distributed manner. The design objective of the CD-ICC is to reduce the end-to-end delay, the duty cycle, and the average power transmission. The simulation and numerical results presented here show that, under general conditions, CD-ICC can enhance network performance compared to direct transmission mode (DTM) IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA and benchmarking. To this end, we have shown that the power saving when using CD-ICC is 37.5% with respect to DTM IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA and 10% with respect to MI-ICC. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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18 pages, 3298 KiB  
Article
Integrating Gaze Tracking and Head-Motion Prediction for Mobile Device Authentication: A Proof of Concept
by Zhuo Ma, Xinglong Wang, Ruijie Ma, Zhuzhu Wang and Jianfeng Ma
Sensors 2018, 18(9), 2894; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18092894 - 31 Aug 2018
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4441
Abstract
We introduce a two-stream model to use reflexive eye movements for smart mobile device authentication. Our model is based on two pre-trained neural networks, iTracker and PredNet, targeting two independent tasks: (i) gaze tracking and (ii) future frame prediction. We design a [...] Read more.
We introduce a two-stream model to use reflexive eye movements for smart mobile device authentication. Our model is based on two pre-trained neural networks, iTracker and PredNet, targeting two independent tasks: (i) gaze tracking and (ii) future frame prediction. We design a procedure to randomly generate the visual stimulus on the screen of mobile device, and the frontal camera will simultaneously capture head motions of the user as one watches it. Then, iTracker calculates the gaze-coordinates error which is treated as a static feature. To solve the imprecise gaze-coordinates caused by the low resolution of the frontal camera, we further take advantage of PredNet to extract the dynamic features between consecutive frames. In order to resist traditional attacks (shoulder surfing and impersonation attacks) during the procedure of mobile device authentication, we innovatively combine static features and dynamic features to train a 2-class support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The experiment results show that the classifier achieves accuracy of 98.6% to authenticate the user identity of mobile devices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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16 pages, 10420 KiB  
Article
Characterization of the Fat Channel for Intra-Body Communication at R-Band Frequencies
by Noor Badariah Asan, Emadeldeen Hassan, Jacob Velander, Syaiful Redzwan Mohd Shah, Daniel Noreland, Taco J. Blokhuis, Eddie Wadbro, Martin Berggren, Thiemo Voigt and Robin Augustine
Sensors 2018, 18(9), 2752; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18092752 - 21 Aug 2018
Cited by 42 | Viewed by 5436
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the use of fat tissue as a communication channel between in-body, implanted devices at R-band frequencies (1.7–2.6 GHz). The proposed fat channel is based on an anatomical model of the human body. We propose a novel probe that [...] Read more.
In this paper, we investigate the use of fat tissue as a communication channel between in-body, implanted devices at R-band frequencies (1.7–2.6 GHz). The proposed fat channel is based on an anatomical model of the human body. We propose a novel probe that is optimized to efficiently radiate the R-band frequencies into the fat tissue. We use our probe to evaluate the path loss of the fat channel by studying the channel transmission coefficient over the R-band frequencies. We conduct extensive simulation studies and validate our results by experimentation on phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, with good agreement between simulations and experiments. We demonstrate a performance comparison between the fat channel and similar waveguide structures. Our characterization of the fat channel reveals propagation path loss of ∼0.7 dB and ∼1.9 dB per cm for phantom and ex-vivo porcine tissue, respectively. These results demonstrate that fat tissue can be used as a communication channel for high data rate intra-body networks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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15 pages, 847 KiB  
Article
Channel Characteristic Aware Privacy Protection Mechanism in WBAN
by Puning Zhang and Jie Ma
Sensors 2018, 18(8), 2403; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18082403 - 24 Jul 2018
Cited by 24 | Viewed by 3806
Abstract
Advances of information and communication technologies in medical areas have led to the emergence of wireless body area network (WBAN). The high accessibility of media in WBAN can easily lead to the malicious tapping or tampering attacks, which may steal privacy data or [...] Read more.
Advances of information and communication technologies in medical areas have led to the emergence of wireless body area network (WBAN). The high accessibility of media in WBAN can easily lead to the malicious tapping or tampering attacks, which may steal privacy data or inject wrong data. However, existing privacy protection mechanisms in WBAN depend on the third-party key management system and have a complex key exchange process. To enhance user privacy at a low cost and with high flexibility, a channel characteristic aware privacy protection mechanism is proposed for WBAN. In the proposed mechanism, the similarity of RSS is measured to authenticate nodes. The key extraction technique can reduce the cost of the key distribution process. Due to the half duplex communication mode of sensors, the biased random sequences are extracted from the RSS of sensor nodes and coordinator. To reduce the inconsistency, we propose the n-dimension quantification and fuzzy extraction, which can quickly encrypt the transmission information and effectively identify malicious nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively protect user privacy against tampering and eavesdropping attacks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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25 pages, 2858 KiB  
Article
A Personalized Healthcare Monitoring System for Diabetic Patients by Utilizing BLE-Based Sensors and Real-Time Data Processing
by Ganjar Alfian, Muhammad Syafrudin, Muhammad Fazal Ijaz, M. Alex Syaekhoni, Norma Latif Fitriyani and Jongtae Rhee
Sensors 2018, 18(7), 2183; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18072183 - 06 Jul 2018
Cited by 156 | Viewed by 13307
Abstract
Current technology provides an efficient way of monitoring the personal health of individuals. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based sensors can be considered as a solution for monitoring personal vital signs data. In this study, we propose a personalized healthcare monitoring system by utilizing a [...] Read more.
Current technology provides an efficient way of monitoring the personal health of individuals. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-based sensors can be considered as a solution for monitoring personal vital signs data. In this study, we propose a personalized healthcare monitoring system by utilizing a BLE-based sensor device, real-time data processing, and machine learning-based algorithms to help diabetic patients to better self-manage their chronic condition. BLEs were used to gather users’ vital signs data such as blood pressure, heart rate, weight, and blood glucose (BG) from sensor nodes to smartphones, while real-time data processing was utilized to manage the large amount of continuously generated sensor data. The proposed real-time data processing utilized Apache Kafka as a streaming platform and MongoDB to store the sensor data from the patient. The results show that commercial versions of the BLE-based sensors and the proposed real-time data processing are sufficiently efficient to monitor the vital signs data of diabetic patients. Furthermore, machine learning–based classification methods were tested on a diabetes dataset and showed that a Multilayer Perceptron can provide early prediction of diabetes given the user’s sensor data as input. The results also reveal that Long Short-Term Memory can accurately predict the future BG level based on the current sensor data. In addition, the proposed diabetes classification and BG prediction could be combined with personalized diet and physical activity suggestions in order to improve the health quality of patients and to avoid critical conditions in the future. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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Review

Jump to: Research

29 pages, 727 KiB  
Review
A Review of Wearable Solutions for Physiological and Emotional Monitoring for Use by People with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Caregivers
by Mohammed Taj-Eldin, Christian Ryan, Brendan O’Flynn and Paul Galvin
Sensors 2018, 18(12), 4271; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18124271 - 04 Dec 2018
Cited by 73 | Viewed by 10792
Abstract
The goal of real-time feedback on physiological changes, stress monitoring and even emotion detection is becoming a technological reality. People in their daily life experience varying emotional states, some of which are negative and which can lead to decreased attention, decreased productivity and [...] Read more.
The goal of real-time feedback on physiological changes, stress monitoring and even emotion detection is becoming a technological reality. People in their daily life experience varying emotional states, some of which are negative and which can lead to decreased attention, decreased productivity and ultimately, reduced quality of life. Therefore, having a solution that continuously monitors the physiological signals of the person and assesses his or her emotional well-being could be a very valuable tool. This paper aims to review existing physiological and motional monitoring devices, highlight their features and compare their sensing capabilities. Such technology would be particularly useful for certain populations who experience rapidly changing emotional states such as people with autism spectrum disorder and people with intellectual disabilities. Wearable sensing devices present a potential solution that can support and complement existing behavioral interventions. This paper presents a review of existing and emerging products in the market. It reviews the literature on state-of-the-art prototypes and analyzes their usefulness, clinical validity, and discusses clinical perspectives. A small number of products offer reliable physiological internal state monitoring and may be suitable for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It is likely that more promising solutions will be available in the near future. Therefore, caregivers should be careful in their selection of devices that meet the care-receiver’s personal needs and have strong research support for reliability and validity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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21 pages, 3844 KiB  
Review
Wearable Hardware Design for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)
by Fayez Qureshi and Sridhar Krishnan
Sensors 2018, 18(11), 3812; https://doi.org/10.3390/s18113812 - 07 Nov 2018
Cited by 104 | Viewed by 12158
Abstract
As the life expectancy of individuals increases with recent advancements in medicine and quality of living, it is important to monitor the health of patients and healthy individuals on a daily basis. This is not possible with the current health care system in [...] Read more.
As the life expectancy of individuals increases with recent advancements in medicine and quality of living, it is important to monitor the health of patients and healthy individuals on a daily basis. This is not possible with the current health care system in North America, and thus there is a need for wireless devices that can be used from home. These devices are called biomedical wearables, and they have become popular in the last decade. There are several reasons for that, but the main ones are: expensive health care, longer wait times, and an increase in public awareness about improving quality of life. With this, it is vital for anyone working on wearables to have an overall understanding of how they function, how they were designed, their significance, and what factors were considered when the hardware was designed. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the hardware components that are required to design wearable devices that are used in the emerging context of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). This means that they can be used, to an extent, for disease monitoring through biosignal capture. In particular, this review study covers the basic components that are required for the front-end of any biomedical wearable, and the limitations that these wearable devices have. Furthermore, there is a discussion of the opportunities that they create, and the direction that the wearable industry is heading in. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks and Connected Health)
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