Ultralow power radio design for emerging healthcare applications

The rapid growth in physiological sensors, low power integrated circuits, and wireless communication has enabled a new generation of wireless sensor networks for healthcare. The wireless body area network (WBAN) is a new wireless network that could allow inexpensive continuous health monitoring and early detection of medical patient conditions via the Internet. Intelligent physiological sensors can be placed on, in, or around the human body to collect various physiological changes in order to monitor the patient’s health status no matter where the patient is [1,2]. The information will be transmitted wirelessly to an external base station, mostly in the form of a smart phone. The base station will instantly transmit all information in real time to the healthcare providers. If an emergency is detected, the patient and his or her caregivers will be immediately informed to take the required actions. The development of telehealth solutions is pushed by large industry alliances such as Continua [3]. And in the last few years, telemonitoring products have been introduced in the area of cardiac health management by companies like Cardionet [4], Corventis [5], AliveCor [6], and Airstrip [7]. In parallel, several pilot trials have been reported for the use of WBAN technologies in various applications (e.g., for sleep [8] or epilepsy monitoring [9]). The WBAN concept allows patients to stay in their home environment and hence have a better quality of life with lower costs involved. The reduced cost of this concept is a necessity as the cost of healthcare in First World countries 254is increasing dramatically as a result of advances in medicine, a population that is becoming older, and an increasingly unhealthy lifestyle