Communication in personal healthcare

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are planned to be deployed in critical applications like border surveillance, monitoring physical and chemical environmental phenomena, intelligent agriculture and personal healthcare. Theses days, researchers’ vision is to implant sensor nodes in the human body, which will monitor the biological parameters and report them to the patient and the doctor, when abnormalities are detected. However, due to the criticality of these applications a thorough evaluation of the existing standards and technologies for suitability is needed. This paper evaluates the existing technologies and standards designed for sensor networks from the perspective of a personal healthcare system. The main focus of this paper is to evaluate the power efficiency of the node and the channel reuse factor in different conditions. Proposals are also made towards improving the weaknesses.