Medical Body Area Networks: Opportunities, challenges and practices

Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) is a new wireless communications technology designed to sense human's vital signals through tiny nodes in, on and around the human body wirelessly. MBAN will play an important role in enabling ubiquitous and non-invasive telemetry and healthcare systems in the future. In this paper, we firstly explore the opportunities of MBAN from the point of new applications, and then we analyze the enabling technologies and challenges to achieve the goal of MBAN, which includes energy efficiency, robustness, high data rate for video support and network co-existence issues. Finally, we describe our MQWIN400 radio platform which was designed to work at 400MHz MICS band, as well as the related research activities and experimental results.