IEEE Wireless Communications: Special Issue on Wireless Networking for e-Health Applications

Abstract:

<p>General Description
The confluence of electronics miniaturization, information proliferation in healthcare, and novel concepts for energy efficiency and energy scavenging, has pushed the application of Mobile Wireless Networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and — perhaps more importantly so — Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) from the realm of theoretical exploration into healthcare reality. This advance heralds in a new era for patient monitoring, medical procedures, patient status awareness, outpatient treatment, and a plethora of other areas in modern healthcare.
With the advent of these new e-Health applications and their associated requirements and constraints, many vital topics of research need to be explored to provide robustness, security, responsiveness, and longevity of the wireless network and patient health information. This special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art in wireless networking for e-Health applications, associated technical and regulatory challenges, as well as exploring deployments and implementations in real-world applications.

Purpose and Significance
Developments in component miniaturization of electronics and sensing devices, advances in low-power wireless communication, and the arrival of energy harvesting have led to the development of ultra-low power wireless communication and sensing devices that are ideally suited for mobile healthcare applications. These devices can be installed in medical facilities and equipment, or worn directly on a patient's body, allowing for real-time data acquisition, data fusion, reporting, and alerting from a plethora of sources. This allows for an unprecedented level of insight into a patient's health, with a similarly high level of fidelity of the collected data that in many cases is sufficient to allow biometric identification of an individual.

As a result, significant precautions are needed to protect the collected information, both during their transmission as well for storage. The security of individual wireless devices and applications from malicious access is also vitally important, in order to prevent information falsification and impersonation with potentially fatal results. Furthermore, different countries have varying regulatory requirements for e-Health devices and application that need to be carefully studied and implemented, but that also need to be explored for their potential ramifications for open research challenges and future trends. This is also reflected in the need to explore actual implementations, products, and real-world experiences of design, implementation, and operation of e-Health-enabled environments.

With a technology that can have such a literally vital impact on our lives, there are inevitably a plethora of challenges and opportunities that need to be explored. Providing an overview and insight into current developments and future trends of systems, protocols, and applications is the goal of this special issue.

Publications related to the proposed special issue include Liebert's open-acccess journal "Telemedicine and e-Health" (impact factor 1.297), the open-access "Journal of Medical Internet Research" (impact factor 4.7), and IGI-Global's "International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications". While related, they are also much broader in scope, with a much more limited exploration of the areas of Wireless Sensor Networks and Wireless Body Area Networks compared to the proposed special issue. With the rapid advances in this field there is a great demand for research publications aimed specifically at WSN and WBAN in e-Health. This makes the proposed SI both timely and of great interest to a wide potential reader base.

The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

Applications of Wireless Networks in e-Health
Real-World e-Health environments from design to operation — experiences, problems, and insights
Cross-Layer Design for e-Health applications
The PHY Layer of WSN, WBAN, and other e-Health Wireless Networks
MAC and Routing in e-Health Wireless Networks
Privacy, Security and Trust for e-Health applications
Biometrics using WBANs and its applications
Ensuring Energy Efficiency
Energy Harvesting for low-power wireless networking in e-Health applications
RF Interference and Coexistence
Mobility in e-Health applications
Modeling, Simulation, and Performance Evaluation for e-Health technologies
Collaborative, Opportunistic, and Cognitive Wireless Technology in e-Health
Trends, Future Applications and Research Challenges for Wireless Networks in e-Health
Regulatory Challenges and Commercialization of e-Health solutions
Data Collection, Data Storage, Data Sharing, and Cloud Services for e-Health
Analysis of e-Health products for compliance, security, performance, and related issues</p>