Investigation on Healthcare Monitoring Systems: Innovative Services and Applications

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) services and applications have emerged as one of the most attractive research areas and have become more and more widespread especially for healthcare use. Lots of researches have been carried out to specify innovative services and applications using healthcare monitoring systems (HMS). However, the WBAN requirements vary from one application/service to another. Furthermore, HMSs are expected to reduce healthcare costs by enabling the continuous remote monitoring of patients' health even during their daily activities and thus reduce the frequency of the patient's visits at hospital. From a medical point of view, the WBAN will emerge as a key technology by providing real-time health monitoring and diagnosis of many life-threatening diseases. In this paper, the authors outline the WBAN applications and services requirements for healthcare and review them with emphasis on their strength, limitations and design challenges. In addition, HMS architecture and its applications are deeply studied and some case studies are discussed.