Wireless medical sensor networks for smart e-healthcare

Abstract This chapter presents a comprehensive study of various smart e-healthcare scenarios that utilize advancements in the field of wearable medical sensors and efficient body area networks (BANs). Smart monitoring of various physiological parameters of patients in an intrahospital scenario, remote home patients, etc. require continuous acquisition, transmission, and monitoring of such medical parameters. Standard BAN communication protocols have many limitations when it comes to medical applications. Energy efficiency of the medical sensor nodes, prioritization of the medical sensor nodes for access to available channels, energy, and time-efficient routing protocol are some of the challenging issues that this chapter will address. Comparison of various competing communication technologies for BAN along with upcoming network protocols for e-health applications will be presented in this chapter.