An Electronic Tattoo based Wireless Body Area Network (ET-WBAN) to conform IEEE 802.15.6: A Review and Proposal

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been used for many applications such as health monitoring and performance monitoring. It has gained importance due to need for cost effective health monitoring solutions for growing population. Such monitoring requires periodic collection of critical signals from the body; usually done by the sensors. These signals are then transmitted wirelessly through various technologies such as WiFi, Zigbee or Bluetooth. Owing to some limitations of these wireless technologies, new WBAN standards IEEE 802.15.6 are defined. IEEE 802.15.6 standards is a new standard, thus substantial research is to be done on system performance testing to see the implementation possibilities IEEE 802.15.6. The WBAN sensors are often non-invasive sensors which are mounted on the skin or clothing. Researchers recently have developed an epidermal sensor called as Electronic Tattoos (ET). However, ETs have been rarely used in WBAN. This paper reviews various WBAN architectures and proposal for ET based WBAN as per the IEEE 802.15.6 standard. We propose conceptual ET-WBAN which would be tested in future to obtain results and understand performance of ET-WBAN.