Real-time health monitoring in WBANs using hybrid Metaheuristic-Driven Machine Learning Routing Protocol (MDML-RP)

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) are helpful for remote health monitoring, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the limited batteries of bio-sensors, energy-efficient routing is vital to achieve load-balancing and prolong the network's lifetime. Although many routing techniques have been presented for WBANs, they were designed for an application, and their performance may be degraded in other applications. In this paper, an ensemble Metaheuristic-Driven Machine Learning Routing Protocol (MDML-RP) is introduced as an adaptive real-time remote health monitoring in WBANs. The motivation behind this technique is to utilize the superior route optimization solutions offered by metaheuristics and to integrate them with the real-time routing capability of machine learning. The proposed method involves two phases: offline model tuning and online routing. During the offline pre-processing step, a metaheuristic algorithm based on the whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is used to optimize routes across various WBAN configurations. By applying WOA for multiple WBANs, a comprehensive dataset is generated. This dataset is then used to train and test a machine learning regressor that is based on support vector regression (SVR). Next, the optimized MDML-RP model is applied as an adaptive real-time protocol, which can efficiently respond to just-in-time requests in new, previously unseen WBANs. Simu-lation results in various WBANs demonstrate the superiority of the MDML-RP model in terms of application-specific performance measures when compared with the existing heuristic, metaheuristic, and machine learning protocols. The findings indicate that the proposed MDML-RP model achieves noteworthy improvement rates across various performance metrics when compared to the existing techniques, with an average improvement of 42.3% for the network lifetime, 15.4% for reliability, 31.3% for path loss, and 31.7% for hot-spot temperature.