Technological aspects of WBANs for health monitoring: a comprehensive review

According to the World Health Organization, most of the world population is affected by chronic diseases, obesity, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes while another dominant problem is of aging population. Thus, it is desirable to have cost effective solutions for health monitoring, especially for countries that have minimum conventionally trained healthcare staff and infrastructure. Healthcare has shifted from hospital dominant services to patient dominant services which has thrived WBANs to provide ubiquitous health monitoring by virtue of wearable or implantable sensor nodes that commonly monitor biological signals. As the society becomes more health conscious, WBANs have the potential to revolutionize the way people integrate their health and information technology. Hence, WBANs are desired to strengthen conventional healthcare systems. Notwithstanding the current achievements, technological advances, proposed solutions and commercialized products; WBANs still experience many obstacles in their foolproof adoption. This paper surveys the plethora of WBAN applications and network architecture in detail used for data collection, data transmission and data analysis that form sensor analyst system in the realm of Internet of Things. Wireless communicational technologies are also discussed in this paper. Also, we have categorized the routing protocols and have provided with their critical qualitative analysis. Towards the end we discuss several projects in the field of WBANs and some open research areas. These findings on how the sensor nodes, newest routing protocols and data analysis techniques influence ubiquitous health monitoring sets this survey apart from the already existing surveys on WBANs.