Wireless Technology and System Integration in Body Area Networks for m-Health Applications

m-Health integrates mobile computing, medical sensor, and communications technologies for mobile health-care applications. Wireless body area networks (WBANs) of intelligent sensors represent an emerging technology for system integration with great potentials for unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring during extended periods of time. However, system designers will have to resolve a number of issues, such as severe limitations of sensor weight and size necessary to improve user's compliance, sensor resource constraints, intermittent availability of uplink connectivity, reliability of transmission, security, and interoperability of different platforms. We present current and emerging wireless technologies and developments in pervasive and mobile technologies that are vital for implementation of WBAN-based monitors and m-Health system integration. We emphasize the problem of reliable system operation with extremely low power consumption and discontinuous connectivity, which are typical for ambulatory monitoring.