Guest editorial: Wireless body-area networks

The last decade has witnessed the convergence of three giant worlds: electronics, computer science and telecommunications. The next decade should follow this convergence in most of our activities with the generalization of sensor networks. In particular with the progress in medicine, people live longer and the aging of population will push the development of wireless personal networks (WPAN) and wireless body area networks (WBAN), as more and more people will prefer not to go to hospital, should it be for convenience or for cost reasons. The recent advances in wireless technology have helped the development of wireless body area networks (WBAN), where a set of communicating devices gathered in/around a human body can communicate in a ad-hoc way. These devices are connected to sensors which monitor movements and vital body parameters. The WBAN have also been considered for sports and entertainment and thus, they are not only dedicated to medical and healthcare applications. The techniques involved are the latest emerging ones developed for general ad-hoc networks with a special attention to energy and reliability concerns due to the human lives that are involved.