Recent Advances in Body Area Network Technology and Applications

The use of wireless body area networks (WBAN) has been seen as a modern way to monitor human’s health related parameters remotely and seamlessly. The WBAN is utilizing energy efficient sensor nodes distributed around the human body and a coordinator node that controls the personal network’s operation. WBANs are utilizing shortrange radio technologies to convey vital sign information from the source to the final destination; either being electric health record or just a central hub, which can keep track and analyze the measured parameters on-site. The reasoning adopted by the health service providers is to decrease the caregivers’ workload, allowing freedom and mobility for the patients or other persons who need to be monitored. Finally, all these are targeting to improve patients’ quality of life but also to decrease the healthcare costs. Currently technologies, such as the dominant Bluetooth and especially Bluetooth Low Energy, but also ZigBee, IEEE802.15.6, etc. are available for commercial WBAN implementation. In Europe, the European Telecommunication Standard Institute (ETSI) is also developing its own standard for smart body area networks under the Technical Committee SmartBAN. Despite of the existing standards suitable for WBAN use, the research is still widely ongoing. And the prognoses are expecting even wider deployment of wearable technology in healthcare and welfare related applications than it is realized so far. However, WBAN is only one part of the whole concept forming an effective and dependable chain to deliver health related information. The medical information and communication technology (ICT) concept as a whole consists of backbone systems, data collection and analysis, safety and secrecy related issues, various kinds of detectors, energy efficient electronics, and so on. In addition, the data transmission path is typically heterogeneous, which means that information is passing through various radio and wired connections. Moreover, different medical instruments can produce incompatible information, which need to be collected, merged and analyzed jointly with other related information. As can be seen, the medical ICT is multidiscipline research area, which involves communication, electronics, data and signal processing, medical etc. disciplines together. In this Special Issue, we are dealing with the diverse set of topics under the theme of personalized healthcare. The papers included in this Special Issue are extended versions of the papers originally presented in the 10th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT) in 2016 at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA. Seven papers are selected for this Issue. The first paper ‘‘Theoretical and Experimental Approach for the Design of an Optical Wireless Physical Activity Monitoring System’’ by Clément Le Bas et al. investigates theoretically the optical wireless activity monitoring system’s performance in terms of packet failure in a specific environment. Paper studies, in particular, the impact of the optical source directivity, the emitted optical power, the position of the motion sensor device on the body, and the number of optical receivers fixed on the room ceiling. & Matti Hämäläinen [email protected]