Interest and need for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have significantly increased recently. WBAN consists of miniaturized sensors designed to collect and transmit data through wireless network, enabling medical specialists to monitor patients during their normal daily life and providing real time opinions for medical diagnosis. Many wireless technologies have proved themselves in WBAN applications, while others are still under investigations. The choice of the technology to adopt may depend on the disease to monitor and the performance requirements, i.e. reliability, latency and data rate. In addition, the suitable sensor is essential when seeking to extract the data related to a medical measure. This paper aims at surveying the wireless technologies used in WBAN systems. In addition to a detailed survey on the existing technologies, the use of the emerging Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies, and the future 5G, B5G and 6G is investigated, where the suitability of these technologies to WBAN applications is studied from several perspectives. Furthermore, medical applications of WBAN are discussed by presenting their methodologies, the adopted wireless technologies and the used sensors. Given that each medical application requires the appropriate sensor to extract the data, we highlight 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 power consumption, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in WBAN and others.

Recent advances in wireless communication technologies are having a great impact on people's life, especially in the field of healthcare industry that provides a remote monitoring enabling medical staff to follow up the patient and diagnose his disease. LoRa wireless technology is becoming one of the most energetic effective solutions for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) communications. In this work, we propose a LoRa-based low power healthcare WBAN platform called HeaLoRa for an adaptive patient monitoring process. Physicians can remotely monitor patient's temperature, oxygen saturation level, blood pressure and heart rate to prevent any abnormality. Moreover, data acquisition and transmission are controlled based on a power consumption optimization strategy aiming to reduce redundant data. Based on the Early Warning Score (EWS), the system configuration is dynamically adapted, using a Fuzzy logic controller that makes the decision about the system sleep mode duration and the sent data rate. Furthermore, an analytical model of the energy consumption for acknowledged LoRa transmission is presented in this paper. The graphical abstract of the paper illustrates a medical application of a wireless body area network system where LoRa technology is used to transmit the data to a gateway then the data is transmitted to the doctor using IP based technology. By comparing with a reference system, the simulation results indicate that our system consumes 3 to 10 times less of energy depending on the studied scenario.

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