Abstract:
In ubiquitous health-care monitoring (HCM), wireless body area networks (WBANs) are
envisioned as appealing solutions that may o er reliable methods for real-time monitoring of patients’
health conditions by employing the emerging communication technologies. This paper therefore
focuses more on the state-of-the-art wireless communication systems that can be explored in the
next-generation WBAN solutions for HCM. Also, this study addressed the critical issues confronted
by the existing WBANs that are employed in HCM. Examples of such issues include wide-range
health data communication constraint, health data delivery reliability concern, and energy e ciency,
which are attributed to the limitations of the legacy short range, medium range, and the cellular
technologies that are typically employed in WBAN systems. Since the WBAN sensor devices are
usually configured with a finite battery power, they often get drained during prolonged operations.
This phenomenon is technically exacerbated by the fact that the legacy communication systems, such
as ZigBee, Bluetooth, 6LoWPAN, and so on, consume more energy during data communications.
This unfortunate situation o ers a scope for employing suitable communication systems identified in
this study to improve the productivity of WBANs in HCM. For this to be achieved, the emerging
communication systems such as the low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) are investigated in
this study based on their power transmission, data transmission rate, data reliability in the context of e cient data delivery, communication coverage, and latency, including their advantages, as well as
disadvantages. As a consequence, the LPWAN solutions are presented for WBAN systems in remote
HCM. Furthermore, this research work also points out future directions for the realization of the
next-generation of WBANs, as well as how to improve the identified communication systems, to
further enhance their productivity in WBAN solutions for HCM.
