A Study of Wireless Body Area Networks and its Routing Protocols for Healthcare Environment

摘要

Background: The increased cost of treatments in the health care industry and advancements in technologies have led to a promising area of development in Wireless Sensor Networks and semiconductor technologies. Wireless Body Area Networks is a subset of WSN in which sensor nodes are placed on the human body or implanted inside the body to determine various physical parameters of the human body. This information is forwarded to the medical centers or central servers through gateways. The direct advantage of this technology is the existence of portable health monitoring applications as well as location independent monitoring applications. But, still, the existence of smart hospitals needs a lot of focused research related to practical problems faced by patients as well as practitioners.