Wireless Senor Networks Health Monitoring: Trends and Challenges

Wireless sensor network has undergone tremendous development in the last one decade. The reduced size of the sensors coupled with enhanced capability made the dream of unobtrusive monitoring closer to reality. Sensors are cheaper and readily available in the market in these days. These sensors, when deployed on the human body, forms a Body Area Network (BAN) that can detect and forward various physiological parameters to a central node. BAN is under focus by most of the researchers and different applications are underway. BAN is confronted with various challenges due to which it is not yet accepted by majority of people. This paper carries out in depth analysis of technical and functional requirements of BAN. Research challenges to BAN like scalability, power consumption, data rate etc. along with technologies for transferring the data from BAN to central node have also been discussed in brief.