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Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges

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Abstract

Body Area Networks integrated into mHealth systems are becoming a mature technology with unprecedented opportunities for personalized health monitoring and management. Potential applications include early detection of abnormal conditions, supervised rehabilitation, and wellness management. Such integrated mHealth systems can provide patients with increased confidence and a better quality of life, and promote healthy behavior and health awareness. Automatic integration of collected information and user’s inputs into research databases can provide medical community with opportunity to search for personalized trends and group patterns, allowing insights into disease evolution, the rehabilitation process, and the effects of drug therapy. A new generation of personalized monitoring systems will allow users to customize their systems and user interfaces and to interact with their social networks. With emergence of first commercial body area network systems, a number of system design issues are still to be resolved, such as seamless integration of information and ad-hoc interaction with ambient sensors and other networks, to enable their wider acceptance. In this paper we present state of technology, discuss promising new trends, opportunities and challenges of body area networks for ubiquitous health monitoring applications.

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Abbreviations

BAN:

Body Area Network

WBAN:

Wireless Body Area Network

BSN:

Body Sensor Network

mHealth:

Mobile Health System

ASIC:

Application Specific Integrated Circuit

PAN:

Personal Area Network

WAN:

Wide Area Network

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  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA

    Emil Jovanov & Aleksandar Milenkovic

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  1. Emil Jovanov
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  2. Aleksandar Milenkovic
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Correspondence to Emil Jovanov.

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Jovanov, E., Milenkovic, A. Body Area Networks for Ubiquitous Healthcare Applications: Opportunities and Challenges. J Med Syst 35, 1245–1254 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-011-9661-x

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