energy-efficient electronic health monitoring system with wireless body area networks
abstract
recent evolution and technological advancement in wireless communications and micro electronics
have enabled enhanced research trends toward wireless body area networks (wbans). this emerging new
field of research plays an important role in medical and healthcare services. an electronic health
(ehealth) monitoring system is one of the major applications of wbans that in addition to saving
lives can provide cost-effective healthcare services by replacing the need for costly in-hospital
monitoring with wearable or implanted monitoring systems that help early detection and prevention
of any abnormal physiological activities that could risk the patients' lives. such a system
continuously monitors the patient 's vital signs and helps patients to involve in their routine
activities of daily life without requiring intensive or specialized medical services all the
time, thus creating significant enhancement in the standard of living. one of the key
challenges that limit the widespread usage of ehealth solutions in practical healthcare facilities
is the limited battery life of sensor nodes (sns) that are needed to be replaced/ recharged
manually once the energy is depleted. in most scenarios, battery replacement is not preferable, and
it becomes highly unsuitable and impractical, especially when the sns are implanted inside the
human body. this limited battery capacity of sns not only causes a performance bottleneck but is
also likely to disrupt the future operations of sns, which may cause a life hazard. therefore, in
order to have seamless and efficient implementation of an ehealth monitoring wban, improving the
sns' lifetime or energy efficiency (ee) is of paramount importance. [...]