A framework for the design of cost-effective wireless body area networks with efficient data collection

As the demand for fast and efficient solutions in the field of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) increases rapidly, specifically in the field of electronic health (e-health), different approaches have been realized to create systems capable of transmitting a patient's medical data to a control unit for storage and analysis. As some systems expand, more components require a more sophisticated algorithm to send different sensor data simultaneously. The amount of data that will be collected and sent out is typically large and may cause delays in communications and may also require intensive analysis at the destination cloud server. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we outline the implementation of a cost-effective WBAN that connects a patient to both a cloud server and a smartphone application. Secondly, we propose an easy-to-use hardware implementation that selectively chooses the patient's data that should be sent to the storage unit (the cloud server) such that reduction in transmission delays and analysis complexity are achieved. The main motivation behind this work is to devise a framework for designing WBANs that are efficient in terms of cost and data collection.