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GUEST EDITORIAL
WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS FOR E-HEALTH APPLICATIONS
HAMID SHARIF
W
MICHAEL HEMPEL
ith advances in healthcare technologies, digital electronics, smart sensors, and wireless communications, a variety of e-Health applications have come to realization that usher in solutions with new capabilities, enhance and improve current approaches for delivering effective and efficient healthcare services. In this domain, wireless sensors have become a major tool for effective monitoring and control of different operations in e-Health applications as well as delivering sensitive data in real-time and with a high degree of accuracy and reliability. Additionally, the electronics miniaturization, information proliferation in healthcare, and novel concepts for energy efficiency and energy scavenging, have pushed the application of Mobile Wireless Networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and — perhaps more importantly so — Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) from the realm of theoretical exploration into healthcare reality. The enhancements in sensing devices, advances in low-power wireless communication, and the arrival of energy harvesting components have led to the development of ultra-low power wireless communication and sensing devices that are ideally suited for mobile healthcare applications. These devices can be installed in medical facilities and equipment, or worn directly on a patient’s body, allowing for real-time data acquisition, data fusion, reporting, and alerting from a plethora of sources. This allows for an unprecedented level of insight into a patient’s health, with a similarly high level of fidelity of the collected data that in many cases is sufficient to allow biometric identification of an individual. These advances herald in a new era for patient monitoring, medical procedures, patient status awareness, outpatient treatment, and many other vital areas in modern healthcare. As the research continues in different areas of healthcare and digital electronics independently, it becomes necessary to investigate the issues related to the utilization of these new digital capabilities such as wireless sensors in e-Healthcare applications. With the advent of these new e-Health appli-
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THOMAS MICHAEL BOHNERT
ALI KHOYNEZHAD
cations and their associated requirements and constraints, many vital topics of research have to be explored in order to provide the necessary robustness, security, responsiveness, and longevity of the wireless network and the patient’s health information. As a result, it becomes critical to investigate approaches to protect the collected information, both during their transmission as well as during storage. The security and protection of individual wireless devices and applications from malicious access is also vitally important, in order to prevent information falsification and impersonation with potentially fatal results. Different countries also have varying regulatory requirements for e-Health devices and applications that need to be carefully studied and implemented, but that also need to be explored for their potential ramifications for open research challenges and future trends. This is also reflected in the need to explore actual implementations, products, and realworld experiences of design, implementation, and operation of e-Health-enabled environments. This special issue presents a discussion of important e-Health applications with a focus on the state-of-the-art in wireless networking for e-Health applications, associated technical and regulatory challenges, as well as exploring deployments and implementations in real-world applications. Dissemination of major research work in these areas were the editors’ goal in this special issue. We tried to highlight some of the chief research activities with this special issue. Here, we thus present eight articles that focus on different types of e-Health applications and related issues. The first article in this special issue, by Jun Zhou, et al., discusses mobile social networks (M-Healthcare) as a next generation of healthcare network adopted by the US and European governments. The authors investigate the goals and objectives of a distributed architecture of M-Healthcare with an emphasis on the study of security and privacy. Denis Trcek and Andrej Brodnik, in their article, have discussed privacy by focusing on the strategy of incremen-
IEEE Wireless Communications • August 2013
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GUEST EDITORIAL tally adjusting existing protocols in wireless medical body area sensor networks. The authors then have outlined and evaluated their proposed lightweight protocol for privacy in these networks. With their article titled “Context Awareness in WBANs: A Survey on Medical and Non-Medical Applications”, Diana Tobon, et al. have provided a very informative survey on context-aware solutions at the MAC and application layers for Wireless Body Area Networks. They have investigated some of the latest commercial Wireless Body Area Network products and highlighted the lack of context-awareness in these solutions. Wireless Sensor Network applications for e-Health can be found in a wide variety of fields. Pedro Castillejo, et al. have presented two such applications for e-Health: in firefighting and in indoor sports scenarios. The authors have used these scenarios to present a model which can be adapted for other similar applications utilizing smart portable devices. Another highly useful application of eHealth systems is in the treatment and monitoring of patients suffering from psychological disorders. Perez-Diaz de Cerio, et al. have discussed this goal in their article about Help4Mood (H4M), an FP7 project by the European Union, for utilizing information and communication technologies of wireless sensor networks in the treatment of patients suffering from depression. Tapio Heikkila, et al. have discussed the medical and behavioral monitoring of the elderly in their homes by utilizing wireless sensor networks embedded in furniture. The authors have shown with their experimental data that compact algorithms suffice for the successful identification of patients’ activity levels. These algorithms utilize concepts such as nearest neighborhood classifiers and IIR filter banks, and are well suited for use in miniaturized embedded systems. Bin Liu, et al., have presented a Wireless Body Area Network MAC protocol which reduces latency, energy consumption and packet loss rate while still maintaining efficiency and reliability. Contrary to airborne radio transmissions typically found in WSNs, G. Enrico Santagati, et al. have discussed ultrasonic wireless networking in intra-body devices and proposed an ultrasonic communication protocol. In their investigation of this protocol, the authors have explored different characteristics of the involved components, including the choice of communication frequency, power and size. The Guest Editors hope that this issue has provided a focused path through the important area of wireless communication in e-Health and has motivated new and innovative activities in this area. The Editors would like to thank all the authors and reviewers who assisted us with this special issue.
IEEE Wireless Communications • August 2013
BIOGRAPHIES HAMID SHARIF (
[email protected]) received the BSEE degree from the University of Iowa, the MSEE degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the Charles J. Vranek Distinguished Professor in the College of Engineering, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, where he is also the Director of the Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory. He has published a large number of research articles in international journals and conferences. He has been the recipient of a number of best papers awards. He has been serving on many IEEE and other international journal editorial boards and currently is the Co-Editor-InChief for the Wiley Journal of Security and Communication Networks. He has contributed to the IEEE in many roles including the elected Chair of the Nebraska Section, elected Chair of the Nebraska Computer Chapter, elected Chair of the Nebraska Communication Chapter, and the Chapter Coordinator for the IEEE Region 4 in the USA. MICHAEL HEMPEL (
[email protected]) received his Ph.D. in computer engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. He is currently working as a Research Assistant Professor at the Advanced Telecommunication Engineering Laboratory (TEL) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests include wireless communication protocol design and performance analysis, wireless multimedia services, and distributed computing. For his research in networking he has also been developing various network simulation and analysis solutions for streaming media and WiFi/WiMAX/4G technologies. He has authored or co-authored over 80 publications in major international journals and conferences, and served as a TPC member on numerous international conferences. He also serves as an Associate Editor for Wiley’s Security and Communication Networks (SCN). THOMAS MICHAEL BOHNERT (
[email protected]) graduated in Computer Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Mannheim for which he also worked as research associate and lecturer at the Institute for Software Engineering and Communications He is the founder of BNCS, an ICT Consultancy, which he ran from 2000 to 2004 and prior to joining the Center of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC) in Portugal as research scientist and Ph.D. student. While working at CISUC he was invited scholar at Tampere University of Technology (TUT), VTT Technical Research Centre and Beijing University for Post and Telecommunication (BUPT). After his academic tenure he joined SIEMENS Corporate Technology, the company’s coroporate research department, responsible for defining and driving a Future Internet strategy. In 2008 he joined SAP AG, working at the SAP Research Labs Zurich, Switzerland first as senior researcher and later as technical director. In mid 2009 he was appointed chief Future Internet strategist. From 2012 onwards he is with Zurich University of Applied Sciences teaching Service Engineering and continuing Future Internet research as head of the ICCLab. ALI KHOYNEZHAD (
[email protected]) is the Director of Thoracic Aortic Surgery and Associate Professor of Surgery at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Dr Khoynezhad was an Associate Professor in the Department of Surgery and the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning his bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Cologne College of Medicine in Köln, Germany, Dr. Khoynezhad earned his doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He is the recipient of numerous honor and awards including Who’s Who is Medicine and Healthcare and Marquis Who’s Who in America. The Consumers Research Council of America named him one of America’s leading surgeons in America’s Top Surgeons. Dr. Khoynezhad serves on many medical committees and is a member of over 22 professional organizations. His research findings been published in over 80 peer-reviewed medical journals and book chapters and his discoveries have resulted in inventions and patents. He is the editor of the Endovascular Portal of CTSNet and serves as reviewer for the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, Annals of Thoracic Surgery and The European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery.
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