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Development in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has the potential to provide affordable and accessible Tele-healthcare services in developing countries. In rural and remote areas of Pakistan, Lady Health Workers (LHWs) are the main source of healthcare provision. This paper presents a model for providing Tele-Healthcare services using web and mobile phone based technologies to rural and resourcepoor areas of Pakistan. Using the proposed model in this paper, these LHWs will be using SMS and MMS technology to provide healthcare services to people in rural areas of Pakistan. The initiative led to Jaroka Tele-healthcare project, in which the actual implementation of the model is being carried out. This project is currently implemented in Zahidabad, a village in Mardan, NWFP Pakistan. We also discuss the project implementation, methodology, its services and statistics of treatment of patients at Mardan facility, potential benefits and challenges.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) designed for medical, sports, and entertainment applications, have drawn the attention of academia and industry alike. A WBAN is a special purpose network, designed to operate autonomously to connect various medical sensors and appliances, located inside and/or outside of a human body. This network enables physicians to remotely monitor vital signs of patients and provide real time feedback for medical diagnosis and consultations. The WBAN system can offer two significant advantages: patient mobility due to their use of portable monitoring devices and a location independent monitoring facility. With its appealing dimensions, it brings about a new set of challenges, which we do not normally consider in such small sensor networks. It requires a scalable network in terms of heterogeneous data traffic, low power consumption of sensor nodes, integration in and around the body networking and coexistence. This work presents a medium access control protocol for WBAN which tries to overcome the aforementioned challenges. We consider the use of multiple beam adaptive arrays (MBAA) at BAN Coordinator (BAN_C) node. When used as a BAN_C, an MBAA can successfully receive two or more overlapping packets at the same time. Each beam captures a different packet by automatically pointing its pattern toward one packet while annulling other contending packets. This paper describes how an MBAA can be integrated into a single hope star topology as a BAN_C. Simulation results show the performance of our proposed protocol.

SUMMARY In ad hoc networks, directional antennas offer many benefits compared with classical omnidirectional antennas. Those include significant increases in spatial reuse, coverage range, and subsequently network capacity as a whole. Most of the proposed directional medium access control methods assume that all the nodes in the network have homogeneous antenna types. However, it is quite unusual that a sudden change will occur, and every laptop, palmtop, computer, and other similar device will be turned into a directional antenna holding device. There will always be a possibility of heterogeneous antenna used in the deployed nodes of the network. In this paper, we have proposed a medium access control protocol that deals with the new challenges introduced into heterogeneous networks in the form of deaf and hidden node problems. Using Optimized Network Engineering Tools 16.0, we have simulated three ad hoc network scenarios. These scenarios have different ratios of omnidirectional and directional nodes. We evaluated the performance of these scenarios by varying the ratio. We found that when we increase the directional nodes in the network, the performance increases. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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