Wireless Body Area Network Combined with Satellite Communication for Remote Medical and Healthcare Applications

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is expected to play an important role in supporting medical and healthcare services with increased convenience and comfort. One main advantage of WBAN is that it enables automatic biosignal collection in real time which is essential in medical treatment and healthcare vigilance. To harmonize with the strong demands from both medical and healthcare societies, and information and communications technology industries, IEEE 802 Standard Committee set up a task group of TG15.6 to develop an IEEE wireless standard on WBAN. In this paper, we first review the main activities of TG15.6 with the updated status. Then, we present a prototype WBAN system that is implemented by using ultra-wideband technology. Multi-hop mechanism is adopted to guarantee reliable connection. Finally, we describe an experimental system that uses the developed WBAN system by combining with satellite communication in supporting remote medical treatment and healthcare. In case of less of medical resources such as in emergency, in rural or isolated areas, such a system is important in sending the corresponding biosignal to a remote hospital in real time to help patient management. The relative delay of WBAN data delivery via satellite is measured which is dependent on the satellite link capacity.