Wireless Technologies, Medical Applications, and Future Challenges in WBAN: a Survey

International audienceInterest and need for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) havesignicantly increased recently. WBAN consists of miniaturized sensors de-signed to collect and transmit data through wireless network, enabling medicalspecialists to monitor patients during their normal daily life and providing realtime opinions for medical diagnosis. Many wireless technologies have provedthemselves in WBAN applications, while others are still under investigations.The choice of the technology to adopt may depend on the disease to moni-tor and the performance requirements, i.e. reliability, latency and data rate.In addition, the suitable sensor is essential when seeking to extract the datarelated to a medical measure.This paper aims at surveying the wireless technologies used in WBAN sys-tems. In addition to a detailed survey on the existing technologies, the use ofthe emerging Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, and thefuture 5G, B5G and 6G is investigated, where the suitability of these technolo-gies to WBAN applications is studied from several perspectives. Furthermore,medical applications of WBAN are discussed by presenting their methodolo-gies, the adopted wireless technologies and the used sensors. Given that eachmedical application requires the appropriate sensor to extract the data, wehighlight a wide range of the sensors used in the market for medical systems.Recent and future challenges in WBAN systems are given related to the powerconsumption, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies inWBAN and others