Context Aware Body Area Networks for Telemedicine

A Body Area Network (BAN) is a body worn system which provides the user with a set of mobile services. A BAN incorporates a set of devices (eg. mp3 player, video camera, speakers, microphone, head-up display, positioning device, sensors, actuators). A BAN service platform for mobile healthcare and several health BANs targetting different clinical applications have been developed at the University of Twente. Each specialization of the BAN is equipped with a certain set of devices and associated application components, as appropriate to the clinical application. Different kinds of clinical data may be captured, transmitted and displayed, including text, numeric values, images and multiple biosignal streams. Timely processing and transmission of such multimedia clinical data in a distributed mobile environment requires smart strategies. Here we present one approach to designing smart distributed applications to deal with multimedia BAN data; namely the context awareness approach developed in the FREEBAND AWARENESS project.