Comparison of low-power wireless communication technologies for wearable health-monitoring applications

Health monitoring technologies such as Body Area Network (BAN) systems has gathered a lot of attention during the past few years. Largely encouraged by the rapid increase in the cost of healthcare services and driven by the latest technological advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) and wireless communications. BAN technology comprises of a network of body worn or implanted sensors that continuously capture and measure the vital parameters such as heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels and movement. The collected data must be transferred to a local base station in order to be further processed. Thus, wireless connectivity plays a vital role in such systems. However, wireless connectivity comes at a cost of increased power usage, mainly due to the high energy consumption during data transmission. Unfortunately, battery-operated devices are unable to operate for ultra-long duration of time and are expected to be recharged or replaced once they run out of energy. This is not a simple task especially in the case of implanted devices such as pacemakers. Therefore, prolonging the network lifetime in BAN systems is one of the greatest challenges. In order to achieve this goal, BAN systems take advantage of low-power in-body and on-body/off-body wireless communication technologies. This paper compares some of the existing and emerging low-power communication protocols that can potentially be employed to support the rapid development and deployment of BAN systems.