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Applied Sciences
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Body Area Networks
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Body Area Networks

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2019) | Viewed by 37146

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. António Manuel De Jesus Pereira

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Guest Editor
Computer Science Department, School of Technology and Management, Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, Polytechnic of Leiria, Campus 2, Morro do Lena-Alto do Vieiro, Apartado 4163, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: Internet of Things; SMART IoT Ecosystems; Internet of Unmanned Vehicles; Industry 4.0; next-generation networks and services and ambient assisted living
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Nuno Alexandre Ribeiro Costa

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Guest Editor
Computer Science Department, School of Technology and Management, Computer Science and Communications Research Centre, Polytechnic of Leiria, Campus 2, Morro do Lena – Alto do Vieiro, Apartado 4163, 2411-901 Leiria, Portugal
Interests: smart spaces; smart objects; WSN; systems integration; embedded systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Antonio Fernández-Caballero

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Guest Editor
Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 02071 Albacete, Spain
Interests: pattern recognition; human–computer interaction; affective computing; computer vision; multi-sensor fusion
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) represent a fascinating technology that is powering the fourth industrial revolution—Industry 4.0—in conjunction with IoT and Cloud computing. As a sub-field of WSN, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) offer seamless wireless wearable and implantable sensor technology and platforms that are also revolutionizing health care, quality of life and the interaction between physician and patients through new and innovative healthcare applications that are radically improving quality of life, disease prevention, early risk detection, emergency services, cost reduction, rescue, chronic conditions, freedom and mobility. However, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed in order to establish reliable and real-world health care applications, ranging from sensor sizes and power efficiency to security, privacy and standardization.

Authors are invited to submit original high-quality papers from either academia or industry reporting novel advances in, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Ambient assisted living
  • Tele-medicine systems
  • Wearable health monitoring
  • Internet of things for medical and healthcare applications
  • E-Health systems and electronic medical records
  • Hardware and Software architectures and implementations
  • Cloud-based wireless body sensor networks
  • Big-data analytics and machine learning algorithms
  • eHealth security and privacy
  • Energy-efficient PHY and MAC Layer protocols
  • WBAN addressing and routing protocols
  • Fault tolerance, reliability and scalability
  • Case studies on eHealth ethics and social impact
  • Motion detection and activity recognition
  • Human body communication
  • Energy harvesting
  • Ethical and Social issues related to WBANs

Prof. Dr. António Manuel de Jesus Pereira
Prof. Dr. Nuno Alexandre Ribeiro Costa
Prof. Dr. Antonio Fernández-Caballero
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (10 papers)

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Editorial

Jump to: Research

4 pages, 226 KiB  
Editorial
Special Issue on Body Area Networks
by António Pereira, Nuno Costa and Antonio Fernández-Caballero
Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(10), 3540; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10103540 - 20 May 2020
Viewed by 1814
Abstract
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are a fascinating research field offering wearable and implantable sensor technology [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)

Research

Jump to: Editorial

19 pages, 366 KiB  
Article
Body Area Networks in Healthcare: A Brief State of the Art
by Daniel Vera, Nuno Costa, Luis Roda-Sanchez, Teresa Olivares, Antonio Fernández-Caballero and Antonio Pereira
Appl. Sci. 2019, 9(16), 3248; https://doi.org/10.3390/app9163248 - 08 Aug 2019
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3025
Abstract
A body area network (BAN) comprises a set of devices that sense their surroundings, activate and communicate with each other when an event is detected in its environment. Although BAN technology was developed more than 20 years ago, in recent years, its popularity [...] Read more.
A body area network (BAN) comprises a set of devices that sense their surroundings, activate and communicate with each other when an event is detected in its environment. Although BAN technology was developed more than 20 years ago, in recent years, its popularity has greatly increased. The reason is the availability of smaller and more powerful devices, more efficient communication protocols and improved duration of portable batteries. BANs are applied in many fields, healthcare being one of the most important through gathering information about patients and their surroundings. A continuous stream of information may help physicians with making well-informed decisions about a patient’s treatment. Based on recent literature, the authors review BAN architectures, network topologies, energy sources, sensor types, applications, as well as their main challenges. In addition, the paper focuses on the principal requirements of safety, security, and sustainability. In addition, future research and improvements are discussed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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17 pages, 473 KiB  
Article
An Enhanced Mobility and Temperature Aware Routing Protocol through Multi-Criteria Decision Making Method in Wireless Body Area Networks
by Beom-Su Kim, Babar Shah, Feras Al-Obediat, Sana Ullah, Kyong Hoon Kim and Ki-Il Kim
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(11), 2245; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8112245 - 14 Nov 2018
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 2780
Abstract
In wireless body area networks, temperature-aware routing plays an important role in preventing damage of surrounding body tissues caused by the temperature rise of the nodes. However, existing temperature-aware routing protocols tend to choose the next hop according to the temperature metric without [...] Read more.
In wireless body area networks, temperature-aware routing plays an important role in preventing damage of surrounding body tissues caused by the temperature rise of the nodes. However, existing temperature-aware routing protocols tend to choose the next hop according to the temperature metric without considering transmission delay and data loss caused by human posture. To address this problem, multiple research efforts exploit different metrics such as temperature, hop count and link quality. Because their approaches are fundamentally based on simple computation through weighted factor for each metric, it is rarely feasible to obtain reasonable weight value through experiments. To solve this problem, we propose an enhanced mobility and temperature-aware routing protocol based on the multi-criteria decision making method. The proposed protocol adopts the analytical hierarchy process and simple additive weighting method to assign suitable weight factors and choose the next hop while considering multiple routing criteria. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed protocol can efficiently improve transmission delay and data loss better than existing protocols by preventing the temperature rise on the node. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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14 pages, 933 KiB  
Article
A Heterogeneous Ensemble Approach for Activity Recognition with Integration of Change Point-Based Data Segmentation
by Qin Ni, Lei Zhang and Luqun Li
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1695; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091695 - 19 Sep 2018
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4261
Abstract
One of the main topics of Smart Home (SH) research is the recognition of activities performed by its inhabitants, which is considered to be one of the bases to foster new technological solutions inside the home, including services to prolong independent living of [...] Read more.
One of the main topics of Smart Home (SH) research is the recognition of activities performed by its inhabitants, which is considered to be one of the bases to foster new technological solutions inside the home, including services to prolong independent living of the elderly. However, current activity recognition proposals still find problems when considering all the different types of activities that can be performed at home, namely static, dynamic, and transitional activities. In this paper, we consider recognition of transitional activities, which is often ignored in most studies. In addition, we propose a novel dynamic segmentation method based on change points in data stream and construct an ensemble of heterogeneous classifiers to recognize twelve activities (of all types). The experiment is conducted on the dataset collected over ten hours by a wearable accelerometer placed on the person’s wrist. The base classifiers selected to form this ensemble are support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (DT) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN). As a result, the proposed approach has achieved an overall classification accuracy equal to 96.87% with 10-fold cross-validation. Moreover, all activity types considered have been similarly well identified. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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12 pages, 3777 KiB  
Article
Electromagnetic Field Analysis of Signal Transmission Path and Electrode Contact Conditions in Human Body Communication
by Kentaro Yamamoto, Yoshifumi Nishida, Ken Sasaki, Dairoku Muramatsu and Fukuro Koshiji
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1539; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091539 - 03 Sep 2018
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 4124
Abstract
Human body communication (HBC) is a wireless communication method that uses the human body as part of the transmission medium. Electrodes are used instead of antennas, and the signal is transmitted by the electric current through the human body and by the capacitive [...] Read more.
Human body communication (HBC) is a wireless communication method that uses the human body as part of the transmission medium. Electrodes are used instead of antennas, and the signal is transmitted by the electric current through the human body and by the capacitive coupling outside the human body. In this study, direction of electric field lines and direction of electric current through the human body were analyzed by the finite-difference time-domain method to clarify the signal path, which is not readily apparent from electric field strength distribution. Signal transmission from a transmitter on the subject’s wrist to an off-body receiver touched by the subject was analyzed for two types of transmitter electrode settings. When both the signal and ground electrodes were put in contact with the human body, the major return path consisted of capacitive coupling between the receiver ground and the human body, and the electric current through the human body that flowed back to the ground electrode of the transmitter. When the ground electrode was floating, the only return path was through the capacitive coupling of the floating ground. These results contribute to the better understanding of signal transmission mechanism of HBC and will be useful for developing HBC applications. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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11 pages, 1280 KiB  
Article
VLSI Implementation of an Efficient Lossless EEG Compression Design for Wireless Body Area Network
by Chiung-An Chen, Chen Wu, Patricia Angela R. Abu and Shih-Lun Chen
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1474; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091474 - 28 Aug 2018
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3879
Abstract
Data transmission of electroencephalography (EEG) signals over Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is currently a widely used system that comes together with challenges in terms of efficiency and effectivity. In this study, an effective Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design of lossless EEG compression [...] Read more.
Data transmission of electroencephalography (EEG) signals over Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is currently a widely used system that comes together with challenges in terms of efficiency and effectivity. In this study, an effective Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design of lossless EEG compression circuit is proposed to increase both efficiency and effectivity of EEG signal transmission over WBAN. The proposed design was realized based on a novel lossless compression algorithm which consists of an adaptive fuzzy predictor, a voting-based scheme and a tri-stage entropy encoder. The tri-stage entropy encoder is composed of a two-stage Huffman and Golomb-Rice encoders with static coding table using basic comparator and multiplexer components. A pipelining technique was incorporated to enhance the performance of the proposed design. The proposed design was fabricated using a 0.18 μm CMOS technology containing 8405 gates with 2.58 mW simulated power consumption under an operating condition of 100 MHz clock speed. The CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database was used to test the performance of the proposed technique in terms of compression rate which yielded an average value of 2.35 for 23 channels. Compared with previously proposed hardware-oriented lossless EEG compression designs, this work provided a 14.6% increase in compression rate with a 37.3% reduction in hardware cost while maintaining a low system complexity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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17 pages, 4275 KiB  
Article
Low-Power, High Data-Rate Digital Capsule Endoscopy Using Human Body Communication
by Mi Jeong Park, Taewook Kang, In Gi Lim, Kwang-Il Oh, Sung-Eun Kim, Jae-Jin Lee and Hyung-Il Park
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(9), 1414; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8091414 - 21 Aug 2018
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 5811
Abstract
A technology for low-power high data-rate digital capsule endoscopy with human body communication (CEHBC) is presented in this paper. To transfer the image data stably with low power consumption, the proposed system uses three major schemes: Frequency selective digital transmission (FSDT) modulation with [...] Read more.
A technology for low-power high data-rate digital capsule endoscopy with human body communication (CEHBC) is presented in this paper. To transfer the image data stably with low power consumption, the proposed system uses three major schemes: Frequency selective digital transmission (FSDT) modulation with HBC, the use of an algorithm to select electrode pairs, and the LineSync algorithm. The FSDT modulation supports high-data rate transmission and prevents the signal attenuation effect. The selection algorithm of the electrode pair finds the best receiving channel. The LineSync algorithm synchronizes the data and compensates for data polarity during the long data transmission section between the capsule endoscope and the receiver. Because all the major functional blocks of the CEHBC transmitter can be implemented as digital logics, they can be easily fabricated using the field programmable gate array (FPGA). Moreover, this CEHBC transmitter can achieve low power-consumption and can support a relatively high data rate in spite of using its clock a few tens of MHz slower. The proposed CEHBC-TXD is the digital portion of the CEHBC transmitter that provides low-power (3.7 mW) and high data-rate (6 Mbps) performance while it supports a high-resolution image (480 × 480 byte) at 3.13 fps. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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17 pages, 6107 KiB  
Article
Energy Management Integrated Circuit for Multi-Source Energy Harvesters in WBAN Applications
by Sung-Eun Kim, Taewook Kang, Kwang-Il Oh, Mi Jeong Park, Hyung-Il Park, In Gi Lim and Jae-Jin Lee
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(8), 1262; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8081262 - 31 Jul 2018
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4017
Abstract
This paper presents an energy management integrated circuit for multiple energy harvesters in wireless body area network applications. The electrical power acquired from a single energy harvester around a human body is limited to micro watts, which is insufficient to drive a wearable [...] Read more.
This paper presents an energy management integrated circuit for multiple energy harvesters in wireless body area network applications. The electrical power acquired from a single energy harvester around a human body is limited to micro watts, which is insufficient to drive a wearable electronic device. To increase this small amount, the energy from a number of harvesters has to be combined. By combining the energy from multiple distributed harvesters, each one producing negligible energy, significant energy for wearable devices can be obtained. In designing an energy management circuit for a wearable device, there are two issues to be resolved. The first is related to the power consumption of the circuit, and the second issue is related to the methods needed to manage the wide range of power that occurs as the energy input changes during harvesting. In this paper, an energy management circuit that resolves the two issues above is described. The circuit was integrated using 0.13 µm Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. The energy management circuit is designed to combine up to three sources of harvested energy with more than 90% operating efficiency over the entire power range of the energy harvested. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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24 pages, 3996 KiB  
Article
A Novel Bitrate Adaptation Method for Heterogeneous Wireless Body Area Networks
by Krzysztof K. Cwalina, Slawomir J. Ambroziak, Piotr Rajchowski, Jaroslaw Sadowski and Jacek Stefanski
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(7), 1209; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8071209 - 23 Jul 2018
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 3106
Abstract
In the article, a novel bitrate adaptation method for data streams allocation in heterogeneous Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is presented. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm was compared with other known algorithms of data stream allocation using computer simulation. A dedicated simulator [...] Read more.
In the article, a novel bitrate adaptation method for data streams allocation in heterogeneous Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) is presented. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm was compared with other known algorithms of data stream allocation using computer simulation. A dedicated simulator has been developed using results of measurements in the real environment. The usage of the proposed adaptive data streams allocation method by transmission rate adaptation based on radio channel parameters can increase the efficiency of resources’ usage in a heterogeneous WBANs, in relation to fixed bitrates transmissions and the use of well-known algorithms. This increase of efficiency has been shown regardless of the mobile node placement on the human body. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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16 pages, 2373 KiB  
Article
An Off-Body Narrowband and Ultra-Wide Band Channel Model for Body Area Networks in a Ferryboat Environment
by Krzysztof K. Cwalina, Slawomir J. Ambroziak and Piotr Rajchowski
Appl. Sci. 2018, 8(6), 988; https://doi.org/10.3390/app8060988 - 16 Jun 2018
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 3217
Abstract
In the article an off-body narrowband and ultra-wide band channel model for body area networks in a ferryboat environment is described. Considering the limited number of publications there is a need to develop an off-body channel model, which will facilitate the design of [...] Read more.
In the article an off-body narrowband and ultra-wide band channel model for body area networks in a ferryboat environment is described. Considering the limited number of publications there is a need to develop an off-body channel model, which will facilitate the design of radio links, both from the multimedia services provider and the security point of view, for body area networks in this atypical environment. A mobile heterogeneous measurement stand, using radio distance measurements, which consists of three types of devices: miniaturized mobile nodes, stationary reference nodes, and a data acquisition server, was developed. A detailed analysis of both radio channels’ parameters was carried out. An analysis of system loss for off-body communication, including mean system loss, large-scale fading (corresponding to body shadowing), and small-scale fading (associated with the multipath phenomenon), both for 868 MHz narrowband and for 6489 MHz ultra-wide band channels, was performed. A statistical analysis of the obtained system loss model parameters was also carried out; good fit to the empirical data is observed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Body Area Networks)
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