WIRELESS BODY AREA NETWORKS Information Dissemination Analysis

Telemedicine integrated wearable health monitoring system is a novel technology with aiming to support early detection of abnormal conditions and prevention of its serious consequences. Recent Advances in technology has led to the development of small, intelligent, wearable sensors capable of remotely performing critical health monitoring tasks and then transmitting patient's data back to health care centers over wireless medium. Patients benefit from continuous ambulatory monitoring as a part of a diagnostic procedure, optimal maintenance of a chronic condition or during supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure. This requires continuous functioning of the wearable sensor devices. But to the day, energy remains to be a big constraint in enhancing Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) (IEEE 802.15 WPAN Task Group, 2003) lifetime. Some recent literature on WBANs proposes multi-hop sensor-to-gateway data relay as more energy efficient than single hop communication. There are studies which argue contrarily. This study analyzes the single vs multi-hop energy consumption effect for real short range sensor devices.