Abstracting information on body area networks
View / Open Files
Authors
Brandão, Pedro
Advisors
Bacon, Jean
Date
2012-01-10Awarding Institution
University of Cambridge
Author Affiliation
Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
Computer Laboratory
Magdalene College
Qualification
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Language
English
Type
Thesis
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Brandão, P. (2012). Abstracting information on body area networks (Doctoral thesis). https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.16372
Abstract
Healthcare is changing, correction...healthcare is in need of change. The population ageing, the increase in chronic and heart diseases and just the increase in population size will overwhelm the current hospital-centric healthcare.
There is a growing interest by individuals to monitor their own physiology. Not only for sport activities, but also to control their own diseases. They are changing from the passive healthcare receiver to a proactive self-healthcare taker. The focus is shifting from hospital centred treatment to a patient-centric healthcare monitoring.
Continuous, everyday, wearable monitoring and actuating is part of this change. In this setting, sensors that monitor the heart, blood pressure, movement, brain activity, dopamine levels, and actuators that pump insulin, “pump” the heart, deliver drugs to specific organs, stimulate the brain are needed as pervasive components in and on the body. They will tend for people’s need of self-monitoring and facilitate healthcare delivery.
These components around a human body that communicate to sense and act in a coordinated fashion make a Body Area Network (BAN). In most cases, and in our view, a central, more powerful component will act as the coordinator of this network. These networks aim to augment the power to monitor the human body and react to problems discovered with this observation. One key advantage of this system is their overarching view of the whole network. That is, the central component can have an understanding of all the monitored signals and correlate them to better evaluate and react to problems. This is the focus of our thesis.
In this document we argue that this multi-parameter correlation of the heterogeneous sensed information is not being handled in BANs. The current view depends exclusively on the applica- tion that is using the network and its understanding of the parameters. This means that every application will oversee the BAN’s heterogeneous resources managing them directly without taking into consideration other applications, their needs and knowledge.
There are several physiological correlations already known by the medical field. Correlating blood pressure and cross sectional area of blood vessels to calculate blood velocity, estimating oxygen delivery from cardiac output and oxygen saturation, are such examples. This knowledge should be available in a BAN and shared by the several applications that make use of the network. This architecture implies a central component that manages the knowledge and the resources. And this is, in our view, missing in BANs.
Our proposal is a middleware layer that abstracts the underlying BAN’s resources to the applica- tion, providing instead an information model to be queried. The model describes the correlations for producing new information that the middleware knows about. Naturally, the raw sensed data is also part of the model. The middleware hides the specificities of the nodes that constitute the BAN, by making available their sensed production. Applications are able to query for information attaching requirements to these requests. The middleware is then responsible for satisfying the requests while optimising the resource usage of the BAN.
Our architecture proposal is divided in two corresponding layers, one that abstracts the nodes’ hardware (hiding node’s particularities) and the information layer that describes information available and how it is correlated. A prototype implementation of the architecture was done to illustrate the concept.
Keywords
Body area networks
Sponsorship
This work was partially supported by PhD scholarship SFRH/BD/28843/2006 from Fundação da Ciência e Tecnologia from Portugal.
Rights
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales
Licence URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/
Statistics
Total file downloads (since January 2020). For more information on metrics see the
IRUS guide.
Recommended or similar items
The following licence files are associated with this item: