Reliable and privacy-preserving wireless body-area sensor networks for e-health monitoring

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Healthcare costs have been skyrocketing as the baby boom generation continues to grey. Remote e-health monitoring has been shown to be promising for decreasing emergency room visits and/or hospitalizations, as compared to standard traditional healthcare. With the advancement of wireless communications and networking technology, wireless sensor networks on human body are emerging as a new approach to monitoring patient health and disease progression. This research project focuses on development of wireless body area sensor networks for e-healthcare applications. It will develop a new set of networking solutions for power-efficient, reliable, and privacy-preserving wireless information delivery, taking account of the unique propagation characteristics and strict networking performance requirements. It will (i) analyze and develop network topology with potential relay node and cooperative communications to guarantee reliability in information transfer, (ii) develop a medium access control scheme to achieve high energy efficiency for sensor nodes in a body-area propagation environment, and (iii) develop information security and privacy preservation protocols that are critical for transmitting sensitive patient healthcare information and identity between the patient and healthcare providers.