Wireless Body Area Network System Architecture for Real-Time Diabetes Monitoring

Technological advancement in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) has gained much interest and became an emerging technology in the remote healthcare monitoring as WBANs are a collection of low-power, intelligent, miniaturized, lightweight, invasive or non-invasive bio sensors that operate in the proximity of a human body through wireless communication. They offer innovative and promising healthcare applications to improve the quality of life of patients by continuously monitoring human’s physiological vital signs. Based on existing literature on WBANs, technologies and standards, this paper proposes a WBAN to support remote healthcare monitoring of diabetic patients by ensuring higher degree of confidence in Quality of Information (QoI) through real-time data. The proposed architecture includes several features which enables better patient monitoring. Moreover, a qualitative approach is used to evaluate the systems’ architecture. Finally, the open research challenges and future works associated with WBANs design are discussed and evaluated.