Abstract-Wireless body area networks (WBANs) and their supporting information infrastructures offer unprecedented opportunities to monitor state of health without constraining the activities of a wearer. These mobile point-of-care systems are now realizable due to the convergence of technologies such as low-power wireless communication standards, plug-andplay device buses, off-the-shelf development kits for low-power microcontrollers, handheld computers, electronic medical records, and the Internet. To increase acceptance of personal monitoring technology while lowering equipment cost, advances must be made in interoperability (at both the system and device levels) and security. This paper presents an overview of WBAN infrastructure work in these areas currently underway in the Medical Component Design Laboratory at Kansas State University (KSU) and at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). KSU efforts include the development of wearable health status monitoring systems that utilize ISO/IEEE 11073, Bluetooth, Health Level 7, and OpenEMed. WBAN efforts at UAH include the development of wearable activity and health monitors that incorporate ZigBee-compliant wireless sensor platforms with hardware-level encryption and the TinyOS development environment. WBAN infrastructures are complex, requiring many functional support elements. To realize these infrastructures through collaborative efforts, organizations such as KSU and UAH must define and utilize standard interfaces, nomenclature, and security approaches.
Interoperability standards, if properly applied to medical system design, have the potential to decrease the cost of point-of-care monitoring systems while better matching systems to patient needs. This paper presents a brief editorial overview of future monitoring environments, followed by a short listing of smart-home and wearable-device efforts. This is followed by a summary of recent efforts in the Medical Component Design Laboratory at Kansas State University to address interoperability issues in point-of-care systems by incorporating the Bluetooth Host Controller Interface, the IEEE 1073 Medical Information Bus, and Health Level 7 (HL7) into a monitoring system that hosts wearable or nearby wireless devices. This wireless demonstration system includes a wearable electrocardiogram, wearable pulse oximeter, wearable data logger, weight scale, and LabVIEW base station. Data are exchanged between local and remote MySQL databases using the HL7 standard for medical information exchange.
A secure, home-to-remote database communication hierarchy using Health Level Seven (HL7) has been developed. Measurements acquired from the patient via a wireless, wearable monitoring system are inserted into a local database using LabVIEW. Periodically, the HL7 client securely updates the remote database with information from the local database. HL7 communications are performed by Interfaceware's Chameleon software. Using Chameleon's flexible interface, doctors and researchers may access these patient data securely, confidentially, and remotely.
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