Sarkar Subhadeep, Misra Sudip
IEEE Pulse. 2016 Jan-Feb;7(1):21-5. doi: 10.1109/MPUL.2015.2498498.
Over the past decade, embedded systems and microelectromechanical systems have evolved in a radical way, redefining our standard of living and enhancing the quality of life. Health care, among various other fields, has benefited vastly from this technological development. The concept of using sensors for health care purposes originated in the late 1980s when sensors were developed to measure certain physiological parameters associated with the human body. In traditional sensor nodes, the signal sources are mostly different environmental phenomena (such as temperature, vibration, and luminosity) or man-made events (such as intrusion and mobile target tracking), whereas in case of the physiological sensors, the signal source is living human tissue. These sensor nodes, as their primary sensing element, have a diaphragm that converts pressure into displacement. This displacement, in turn, is subsequently transformed into an electrical signal. The concept of wireless physiological sensor nodes, however, gained popularity in the mid-2000s, with the sensed data from the nodes transmitted to the hub via a wireless medium. The network formed by this heterogeneous set of wireless body sensor nodes is termed a wireless body-area network (WBAN). Each WBAN is essentially a composition of multiple wireless body sensor nodes and a single hub. The hub is primarily responsible for acquisition of the raw sensed data from all the component sensor nodes and first-level aggregation of the data before transmitting the aggregated data for further analysis to a remote data acquisition center. Here, we outline the evolution of WBANs in the context of modern health care and its convergence with nanotechnology.
在过去十年中，嵌入式系统和微机电系统发生了根本性的演变，重新定义了我们的生活标准并提高了生活质量。在众多其他领域中，医疗保健从这项技术发展中受益匪浅。将传感器用于医疗保健目的的概念起源于20世纪80年代末，当时开发出了用于测量与人体相关的某些生理参数的传感器。在传统的传感器节点中，信号源大多是不同的环境现象（如温度、振动和光度）或人为事件（如入侵和移动目标跟踪），而在生理传感器的情况下，信号源是有生命的人体组织。这些传感器节点作为其主要传感元件，有一个将压力转换为位移的隔膜。这个位移随后又被转换为电信号。然而，无线生理传感器节点的概念在21世纪中期开始流行，节点感测到的数据通过无线介质传输到集线器。由这组异构的无线人体传感器节点形成的网络被称为无线体域网（WBAN）。每个WBAN本质上是多个无线人体传感器节点和一个集线器的组合。集线器主要负责从所有组成传感器节点采集原始感测数据，并在将聚合数据传输到远程数据采集中心进行进一步分析之前对数据进行一级聚合。在此，我们概述了无线体域网在现代医疗保健背景下的发展及其与纳米技术的融合。
