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Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies
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Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2020) | Viewed by 28265

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Tai-hoon Kim

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Convergence Security Engineering, Sungshin University, 2 Bomun-ro 34da-gil, Donam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 02849, Republic of Korea
Interests: SCADA security; ubiquitous healthcare; information security; mobile computing; IoT
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Sabah Mohammed

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer Science, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON P7B 5E1, Canada
Interests: artificial intelligence; ambient intelligence; decision support systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Carlos Ramos

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
GECAD-Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development, P-4200-072 Porto, Portugal
Interests: artificial intelligence; decision-support systems; energy markets; machine learning; smart buildings; virtual power players
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

A wireless body area network (WBAN) connects independent nodes (e.g., sensors and actuators) that are situated in the clothes, on the body, or under the skin of a person. WBAN devices may be embedded inside the body; implants may be surface-mounted on the body in a fixed position; and wearable technology may be accompanied by devices that humans can carry in different positions, in clothes pockets, by hand, or in various bags. A WBAN offers many promising new applications in the area of remote health monitoring, home/health care, medicine, multimedia, sports, and many others, all of which make advantage of the unconstrained freedom of movement a WBAN offers.

The objective of this Special Issue is to address the innovative developments based on current technologies and new ideas related to WBAN applications and technologies. The Special Issue is seeking the latest findings from research and ongoing projects on the methodologies, strategies, frameworks, architectures, and algorithms relevant to WBAN and sensor networks. Additionally, review articles that provide readers with current research trends in both WBAN and sensor networks are also welcome. The potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Sensors;
  • WBAN;
  • Wireless sensors;
  • Medical body area network;
  • Wearable computing devices;
  • Wearable technology;
  • Wireless personal area network;
  • Physiological sensors;
  • Low-power integrated circuits;
  • Wireless communication;
  • Remote patient monitoring;
  • Patient monitoring applications;
  • WBAN technologies;
  • WBAN applications.

Prof. Dr. Tai-hoon Kim
Prof. Sabah Mohammed
Prof. Carlos Ramos
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. Sensors 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 2600 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.

Keywords

  • sensor
  • WBAN
  • IoT
  • sensor devices
  • wireless sensor
  • remote patient monitoring

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 3521 KiB  
Article
Investigation on Insulated, Brain-Implanted Antenna for Highly Reliable Biotelemetry Communication in MICS and ISM Bands
by Geonyeong Shin and Ick-Jae Yoon
Sensors 2020, 20(1), 242; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20010242 - 31 Dec 2019
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 2653
Abstract
We derived a closed-form expression of the maximum power transfer efficiency (MPTE) between a transmitting antenna inside the brain and a receiving antenna outside the head using spherical wave expansion. The derived expression was validated using a FEKO simulation. The properties of the [...] Read more.
We derived a closed-form expression of the maximum power transfer efficiency (MPTE) between a transmitting antenna inside the brain and a receiving antenna outside the head using spherical wave expansion. The derived expression was validated using a FEKO simulation. The properties of the insulator and radiation mode were analyzed in each available medical implant communications service (MICS) and industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band as a means of increasing the reliability of wireless biotelemetry implementation. Some interesting preceding results in the literature were revisited with the figure-of-merit MPTE. It was also newly found that the effect on MPTE by the physical size and material properties of the insulator in both transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) mode decreases for 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz and the loss of the insulator does not have a severe impact on MPTE once the dielectric constant is greater than a certain value. This work can be used as an implanted-antenna design guide for building reliable biotelemetry communication. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies)
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12 pages, 2644 KiB  
Article
Development of a System for Real-Time Monitoring of Pressure, Temperature, and Humidity in Casts
by Chiu-Ching Tuan, Chi-Heng Lu, Yi-Chao Wu, Wen-Ling Yeh, Mei-Chuan Chen, Tsair-Fwu Lee, Yu-Jing Chen and Hsuan-Kai Kao
Sensors 2019, 19(10), 2417; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19102417 - 27 May 2019
Cited by 8 | Viewed by 4781
Abstract
Cast fixation is a general clinical skill used for the treatment of fractures. However, it may cause many complications due to careless treatment procedures. Currently, swathing a cast for a patient can only be determined by a doctors’ experience; however, this cannot be [...] Read more.
Cast fixation is a general clinical skill used for the treatment of fractures. However, it may cause many complications due to careless treatment procedures. Currently, swathing a cast for a patient can only be determined by a doctors’ experience; however, this cannot be determined by the value of pressure, temperature, or humidity with objective and reliable equipment. When swathing a cast for a patient, the end result is often too tight or too loose. Hence, in this paper we developed a sensor for detecting pressure, temperature, and humidity, respectively. This could provide reliable reference cast data to help physicians to understand the tightness of cast swathing and to adjust the tightness of cast swathing instantly to alleviate a patient’s complications caused by excessive pressure or overheating. In this paper, six pressure sensors and one temperature–humidity sensor are used to detect the pressure, temperature, and humidity in an arm swathed with a cast to confirm whether the tightness of the cast is fixing the fracture efficiently, while avoiding causing any damage by using excessive pressure. Currently, the variation in temperature and humidity can be detected by the inflammation of the wound, displaying secretions, and fever in the cast. Based on the experiments, the voltage and power conversion coefficients of the developed sensors could be compensated for by the nonlinear error of the sensor. The experimental results could be instantly displayed on a human interface, such as a smart mobile device. The average skin pressure in a swathed cast was 12.14 g and ranged from 5.0 g to 17.5 g. A few casts exceeded 37.50 g. The abnormal pressure of wrinkles produced during swathing a cast often ranged from 22.50 g to 38.75 g. This shows that cast wrinkles cause pressure on the skin. The pressure caused by cast wrinkles on bone protrusions ranged from 56.5 g to 84.4 g. Compared to other parts that lacked soft skin cushioning, the pressure of cast wrinkles that occurred in the ulna near the protrusion of the wrist bone increased averagely. The pressure error value was less than 2%, the temperature error was less than 1%, and the humidity error was less than 5%. Therefore, they were all in line with the specifications of commercially available products. The six pressure detection points and one temperature and humidity detection point in our newly designed system can accurately measure the pressure, temperature, and humidity inside the cast, and instantly display the corresponding information by mobile APP. Doctors receive reliable reference data and are instantly able to understand the tightness of the swathed cast and adjust it at any time to avoid complications caused by pressure or overheating due to excessive pressure. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies)
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16 pages, 1926 KiB  
Article
Data Storage Mechanism Based on Blockchain with Privacy Protection in Wireless Body Area Network
by Yongjun Ren, Yan Leng, Fujian Zhu, Jin Wang and Hye-Jin Kim
Sensors 2019, 19(10), 2395; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19102395 - 25 May 2019
Cited by 64 | Viewed by 6328
Abstract
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play a vital role in the field of patient-health monitoring shortly. They provide a convenient way to collect patient data, but they also bring serious problems which are mainly reflected in the safe storage of [...] Read more.
Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are expected to play a vital role in the field of patient-health monitoring shortly. They provide a convenient way to collect patient data, but they also bring serious problems which are mainly reflected in the safe storage of the collected data. The privacy and security of data storage in WBAN devices cannot meet the needs of WBAN users. Therefore, this paper adopts blockchain technology to store data, which improves the security of the collected data. Moreover, a storage model based on blockchain in WBAN is proposed in our solution. However, blockchain storage brings new problems, for example, that the storage space of blockchain is small, and the stored content is open to unauthorized attackers. To solve the problems above, this paper proposed a sequential aggregate signature scheme with a designated verifier (DVSSA) to ensure that the user’s data can only be viewed by the designated person and to protect the privacy of the users of WBAN. In addition, the new signature scheme can also compress the size of the blockchain storage space. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies)
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22 pages, 2668 KiB  
Article
Using Twitter Data to Monitor Natural Disaster Social Dynamics: A Recurrent Neural Network Approach with Word Embeddings and Kernel Density Estimation
by Aldo Hernandez-Suarez, Gabriel Sanchez-Perez, Karina Toscano-Medina, Hector Perez-Meana, Jose Portillo-Portillo, Victor Sanchez and Luis Javier García Villalba
Sensors 2019, 19(7), 1746; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19071746 - 11 Apr 2019
Cited by 53 | Viewed by 7754
Abstract
In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have received a great deal of attention for their potential use in the spatial and temporal modeling of events owing to the information that can be extracted from these platforms. Within this context, one of the [...] Read more.
In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have received a great deal of attention for their potential use in the spatial and temporal modeling of events owing to the information that can be extracted from these platforms. Within this context, one of the most latent applications is the monitoring of natural disasters. Vital information posted by OSN users can contribute to relief efforts during and after a catastrophe. Although it is possible to retrieve data from OSNs using embedded geographic information provided by GPS systems, this feature is disabled by default in most cases. An alternative solution is to geoparse specific locations using language models based on Named Entity Recognition (NER) techniques. In this work, a sensor that uses Twitter is proposed to monitor natural disasters. The approach is intended to sense data by detecting toponyms (named places written within the text) in tweets with event-related information, e.g., a collapsed building on a specific avenue or the location at which a person was last seen. The proposed approach is carried out by transforming tokenized tweets into word embeddings: a rich linguistic and contextual vector representation of textual corpora. Pre-labeled word embeddings are employed to train a Recurrent Neural Network variant, known as a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (biLSTM) network, that is capable of dealing with sequential data by analyzing information in both directions of a word (past and future entries). Moreover, a Conditional Random Field (CRF) output layer, which aims to maximize the transition from one NER tag to another, is used to increase the classification accuracy. The resulting labeled words are joined to coherently form a toponym, which is geocoded and scored by a Kernel Density Estimation function. At the end of the process, the scored data are presented graphically to depict areas in which the majority of tweets reporting topics related to a natural disaster are concentrated. A case study on Mexico’s 2017 Earthquake is presented, and the data extracted during and after the event are reported. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies)
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21 pages, 4167 KiB  
Article
QoS Management and Flexible Traffic Detection Architecture for 5G Mobile Networks
by Fernando López Rodríguez, Ugo Silva Dias, Divanilson R. Campelo, Robson de Oliveira Albuquerque, Se-Jung Lim and Luis Javier García Villalba
Sensors 2019, 19(6), 1335; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19061335 - 17 Mar 2019
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5453
Abstract
The next generation of 5G networks is being developed to provide services with the highest Quality of Service (QoS) attributes, such as ultra-low latency, ultra-reliable communication, high data rates, and high user mobility experience. To this end, several new settings must be implemented [...] Read more.
The next generation of 5G networks is being developed to provide services with the highest Quality of Service (QoS) attributes, such as ultra-low latency, ultra-reliable communication, high data rates, and high user mobility experience. To this end, several new settings must be implemented in the mobile network architecture such as the incorporation of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), along with the shift of processes to the edge of the network. This work proposes an architecture combining the NFV and SDN concepts to provide the logic for Quality of Service (QoS) traffic detection and the logic for QoS management in next-generation mobile networks. It can be applied to the mobile backhaul and the mobile core network to work with both 5G mobile access networks or current 4G access networks, keeping backward compatibility with current mobile devices. In order to manage traffic without QoS and with QoS requirements, this work incorporates Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) in the mobile data plane. A new flexible and programmable method to detect traffic with QoS requirements is also proposed, along with an Evolved Packet System (EPS)-bearer/QoS-flow creation with QoS considering all elements in the path. These goals are achieved by using proactive and reactive path setup methods to route the traffic immediately and simultaneously process it in the search for QoS requirements. Finally, a prototype is presented to prove the benefits and the viability of the proposed concepts. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Wireless Body Area Networks: Applications and Technologies)
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