Body Area Network, project performed by Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems is a mean that let patients to live their everyday life with their family life while being observed i.e. the health status and report can easily be accessed by the physician online using mobile device like PDA.
The BAN technology requires a wireless network through which sensors attached to the patient’s body are assimilated hence making the sensors as a part of the internet network such that any internet compatible device can simply download the transmitted data. This FOKUS project has granted the physician the viability of future preparation for any emergency cases.
The medical and healthcare sector such as hospitals, home care services, healthcare centers, sports medicine are the realm where the diversified range of FOKUS solutions are set up enthusiastically. Some of the examples are the IPcom project from the Smart Environments division, the I-Net project from the 3G beyond division and many more. FOKUS mainly delve into portable communication systems pro wireless and build up the building blocks required for flawless uninterrupted integration and communication involving technologies and end devices.
2.2.2 Human++ project
Human++ research program is conducted by IMEC that develops standard technologies to improve the functions of therapeutic and diagnostic devices. The basis of this research program understands the communication among the sensors/ actuators of a body area network along with a personal digital assistant to scrutinize a person's health. The various challenges undertaken by Human++ project are briefly stated below:
Increase the interaction among sensors and actuators
Extend devices with chemical and biological features, creating a biocompatible systems
Put in intelligence to the devices
Basically understand computing medical phenomena
Increase the lifetime of battery-powered devices
Incorporate and enclose diverse components
2.2.3 A WBAN of intelligent motion sensors for computer assisted physical rehabilitation
This is a project conducted by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Alabama.
A new enabling technology for health monitoring, WBAN is an archetype which allows the integration of miniature, lightweight, ultra-low power, and intelligent monitoring devices. The attributes of WBAN are standard ZigBee compliant radio and a common set of physiological, kinetic, and environmental sensors. Here, a real time analysis of sensors' data is executed, providing direction and feedback to the users along with generation of warning based on environmental conditions, activity level and user state. The recorded information then can be incorporated into research database and electronic medical record of the user as well as can be transmitted to medical server by means of internet. For the inexpensive, unobtrusive, ubiquitous technology many exigent issues should be determined like:
configuration and customization
system design
faultless integration
security, privacy and social issues
further utilization of common off-the-shelf components
standardization
2.2.7 CodeBlue: Wireless Sensor Networks for Medical Care
CodeBlue project, supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Army, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft Corporation, is developed by Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.
Acute emendation of computation in the physical environment with data gathering is allowable by sensor networks. The CodeBlue project is a wireless sensor network technology application including pre-hospital and in-hospital emergency care, disaster response, and stroke patient rehabilitation. The technology let collect the essential signs automatically during the study of reinvigorate care to be fully integrated into the patient care record and furthermore, to use for real-time triage, correlation with hospital records, and long-term observation.
The areas focused by the research are listed below:
Hardware architectures for ultra-low-power sensing, computation, and communication
Congestion control, adaptive resource management and bandwidth provision in wireless networks
Interoperation with hospital information systems; privacy and reliability issues
Wireless ad-hoc routing protocols for critical care; security, robustness, prioritization
Amalgamation of medical sensors with low-power wireless networks
2.2.10 UbiMon
The department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK developed a monitoring system called UbiMon (i.e. Ubiquitous Monitoring Environment for Wearable and Implantable Sensors) to capture momentary but life threatening events of patients. This continuous and unobtrusive monitoring system is funded by DTI and embodies a coherent cross-disciplinary integration of various proficiency of the association, bringing together computing, electronics, bioengineering and medicine. The cardiovascular disease, which is the major reason of mortality in the industrialized world despite significant progress in its prevention and treatment, is the main motivation factor for the project. Hence, the aim of UbiMon is addressing common issues related to use of wearable and implantable sensors for distributed mobile monitoring.
The main objectives of the project are:
To develop various procedures for mobile interactions with embeddable sensors and interventional devices.
To build up a prelude medical assessment for organization of patients with ischemic and arrhythmic heart disease.
To develop a wearable communicator performing automated methods for multi-sensory data leading to an intervention strategy.
The technical improvement of UbiMon is integrated local processing with remote long term trend analysis that can adapt to environment changes along with low power sensor coupling appropriate for long term implants. In addition, the major deliverables of UbiMon is to predict critical events and improve sensing and episode detection using intelligent data fusion and mining with inclusion of ambient sensors.
2.2.11 WsHC
Wireless communication system, a promising opportunity for medical systems in the operating room, is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative R&D project with prototype development in the following area:
Collection of sensor data (Bluetooth, Zigbee)
Data transfer to and from implantable probes
Distribution of data to health personnel
Communication between health personnel
In the last two points the communication among health personnel is carried out using GSM handsets for message passing, signaling and office synchronization. One of the scenarios for WsHC is when a person with a chronic disease suffers from a severe accident.
