Feasibility and performance evaluation of a 6LoWPAN‐enabled platform for ubiquitous healthcare monitoring

Abstract

Technology has revolutionized medical practices by enabling more convenient and non-intrusive monitoring of patient's health, leading to next generation ubiquitous healthcare (u-healthcare). The exploitation of the Internet protocol version 6 addressing space along with the miniaturization of electronic devices has fostered providing interoperability and connectivity of wearable sensor devices in wireless body area networks to the Internet of Things. In this paper, we propose to integrate the IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) to the u-healthcare monitoring system architecture. The main objective is to study the feasibility of the 6LoWPAN-enabled platform in real-world scenarios dealing with medical data. The performance evaluation of this platform is carried out initially through simulations using OMNet++ and then supported by an experimental study using sensor motes and a customized micro-computing unit. Performance metrics such as throughput, end-to-end delay, packet error rate, and energy consumption are investigated under acute health conditions, where patient's health information has to be sent continuously and at maximum rate to the care provider. The obtained results show that the proposed 6LoWPAN solution fulfills the main quality of service requirements of u-healthcare applications.

Internet of Things: A Scientometric Review

“…In this article, the authors describe the main features and potential applications for BLE technology [178]. This data set shows BLE related applications such as home automation [179][180][181] and indoor location [182][183][184] and health care [185][186][187]. WiFi is the other network protocol used for IoT research, with a total of 85 publications, and applications related to: home automation [188,189], indoor localization [190].…”

Towards Energy Efficiency in the Internet of Wearable Things: A Systematic Review

“…Content may change prior to final publication. Embedded signal processing to avoid unnecessary data transmission by carrying out local processing [54], [57], [58], [87] Compressive sensing to avoid generating unnecessary redundant data [53], [84], [92], [99] Embedded ML to carry out complex computation tasks on the device to reduce latency Wireless technologyrelated issues A, HW [45] Duty cycling to periodically power off communication modules when not in use to conserve energy [49], [61] Adaptive transmission power control of transceiver based on distance to remote node [59] Use of low power wireless communication protcols such as 6LoWPAN [61] A multi channel TDMA approach to allocate slots for simultaneous transmission [109] An adaptive connection interval selection in dynamic channel environments for improved connectivity [98], [148] Low power wireless communication protocols…”

An Experimental Performance Evaluation and Compatibility Study of the Bluetooth Low Energy Based Platform for ECG Monitoring in WBANs

“…A brief comparison of BLE and 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 is shown in Table 6. In several previous works, a complete u-healthcare system based on 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 has been developed to send ECG signals at different rates using an ECG simulator [14,21,35]. The presented systems were able to sample the simulator data from the sensor node and forward it to the gateway.…”

“…The most suitable technologies remain ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 physical and DLL specifications and the recently proposed BLE technologies. The ZigBee/6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 standard is mostly deployed for WSNs [10][11][12][13] but also adapted in WBANs communications for its lowenergy properties [14], while the recently developed BLE stack is gaining interest in research community in WBANs for its low-energy consumption as well.…”