Utility Grid Computing and Body Area Network as Enabler for Ubiquitous Rural e-Healthcare Service Provisioning

Body area network (BAN) has the potential to revolutionalize healthcare management by allowing the use of innovative smart sensors for remote diagnosis, treatment and continuous monitoring of a patient's body conditions. However, there are many challenges such as low bandwidth, limited computational power and limited functionality for communication with wireless sensor networks. On the other hand, utility grid computing (UGC) is rich in functionality, can be used to provide access to appropriate computational services and can give high-bandwidth to a large collection of distributed time-varying resources. This paper describes an integrated UGC-BAN technology as an enabler for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. This would help addressing the challenges of accessibility to quality healthcare services and costs of provisioning to rural communities of developing countries.