A Data Parasitizing Scheme for Effective Health Monitoring in Wireless Body Area Networks

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have emerged recently to provide health monitoring for chronic patients. In a WBAN, the patient's smartphone is deemed an appropriate sink to help forward the sensing data to back-end servers. Through a real-world case study, we observe that temporary disconnection between sensors and the associated smartphone can happen frequently due to postural changes, causing a significant amount of data to be lost forever. In this paper, we propose a scheme to parasitize the data in surrounding Wi-Fi networks whenever temporary disconnection occurs. Specifically, we model data parasitizing as an optimization problem, with the objective of maximizing the system lifetime without any data loss. Then, we propose an optimal offline algorithm to solve the problem, as well as an online algorithm that allows practical implementations. We have also implemented a prototype system, where the online algorithm serves as the underlying technique, based on Arduino. To evaluate our scheme, we conduct a series of experiments with the prototype system in controlled and real-world environments. The results show that the lifetime is prolonged by 100 times, and it could be further doubled if the health monitoring application permits a few packet losses.