Grid-enabled biosensor networks for pervasive healthcare

Current advances in biosensor technology allow multiple miniaturized or textile sensors to record continuously biosignals, such as blood pressure or heart rate, and transmit the information of interest to clinical sites. New applications are emerging, based on such systems, towards pervasive healthcare. This paper describes an architecture enabling biosensors, forming a Body Area Network (BAN), to be integrated in a Grid infrastructure. The Grid services proposed, such as access to recorded data, are offered via the BAN console, an enhanced wearable computer, where the recordings of multiple biosensors are integrated. Medical Grid-enabled Nodes can have access to biosensor measurements upon demand, or can agree to get notifications and alerts. Thus, in such a distributed environment, data and computational resources are independent, yet cooperating unobtrusively, contributing to the notion of pervasive healthcare.