Biomedical sensing analyzer (BSA) for mobile-health (mHealth)-LTE

The rapid expansion of mobile-based systems, the capabilities of smartphone devices, as well as the radio access and cellular network technologies are the wind beneath the wing of mobile health (mHealth). In this paper, the concept of biomedical sensing analyzer (BSA) is presented, which is a novel framework, devised for sensor-based mHealth applications. The BSA is capable of formulating the Quality of Service (QoS) measurements in an end-to-end sense, covering the entire communication path (wearable sensors, link-technology, smartphone, cell-towers, mobile-cloud, and the end-users). The characterization and formulation of BSA depend on a number of factors, including the deployment of application-specific biomedical sensors, generic link-technologies, collection, aggregation, and prioritization of mHealth data, cellular network based on the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) access technology, and extensive multidimensional delay analyses. The results are studied and analyzed in a LabView 8.5 programming environment.

LTE networking : extending the reach for sensors in mHealth applications

Sensor and electronic-health networks are widely utilized at home and in industry/research applications. In a local sense, a sensor-to-sensor network can have a range of a few meters to a couple of hundred meters (ZigBee Pro can extend this range up to 2000 m). With the deployment of mobile technology in the healthcare space (mobile-Health ‘m-Health’) and using cellular coverage, the range can virtually be unbounded. However, supporting bounded delay (end-to-end delay), class of service, and quality of service for critical sensor-mHealth applications may become challenging. This challenge can be alarmingly extended when thousands of users run their sensor-mHealth applications simultaneously and depend on limited coverage of the cell tower to transmit their health-related data across. In this paper we will discuss how the 3rd Generation Partnership Project–Long Term Evolution networks can address such aggregation issues, and discuss the challenges and provide recommendations.