An overview of body sensor networks in enabling pervasive healthcare and assistive environments

The use of sensor networks for healthcare, well-being, and working in extreme environments has long roots in the engineering sector in medicine and biology community. With the growing needs in ubiquitous communications and recent advances in very-low-power wireless technologies, there has been considerable interest in the development and application of wireless networks around humans. With the maturity of wireless sensor networks, body area networks (BANs), and wireless BANs (WBANs), recent efforts in promoting the concept of body sensor networks (BSNs) aim to move beyond sensor connectivity to adopt a system-level approach to address issues related to biosensor design, interfacing, and embodiment, as well as ultra low-power processing / communication, power scavenging, autonomic sensing, data mining, inferencing, and integrated wireless sensor microsystems. As a result, the system architecture based on WBAN and BSN is becoming a widely accepted method of organization for ambulatory and ubiquitous monitoring systems. This review paper presents an up-to-date report of the current research and enabling applications and addresses some of the challenges and implementation issues.