Implementation issues of Body Area Sensor Networks for ubiquitous long-term biomedical signal monitoring and conditioning

Ubiquitous and pervasive health monitoring in everyday life is the key for long-term unobtrusive monitoring of biomedical signals to enable early-stage diagnosis of health issues for proactive health care. Health care costs can be minimized by providing health services at a patient´s home where the cost is the lowest as opposed to expensive clinical environments. Body Area Sensor Networks (BASNs) can be developed with reliability for effective measurement of basic biomedical signals. Signal conditioning component has to be designed in such a way to perform local on-node data processing to decrease the amount of data to be transmitted to the base station. A low-power BASN can be designed and optimized for ubiquitous biomedical signal monitoring through power and energy-aware wireless sensor nodes. The power management strategies have to be analyzed so that the power supply can gradually shift away from battery-powered solutions to completely energy-autonomous nodes that are powered by means of energy harvesting. This paper discusses the implementation issues of BASNs in view of ubiquitous long-term biomedical signal conditioning.