Body Area Networks

Submission Deadline: 10 April 2017

IEEE Access invites manuscript submissions to the Special Section on Body Area Networks. This Special Section will collect the best of “Bodynets 2016,” a conference that “aims to provide a world-leading and unique opportunity for bringing together researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines to plan, analyze, design, build, deploy and experiment with/on Body Area Networks (BANs)” http://bodynets.org/2016/show/home.

The novel requirements of the healthcare sector, facing among other issues, the strong demographic changes associated with aging population put researchers in front of new and exciting challenges. Advanced electronic and networked systems allowing real time health monitoring can strongly reduce medication time and costs. Timely intervention of physicians on individuals living alone or in remote areas, is possible if an appropriate data transmission infrastructure is available. One part of this complex architecture is the Body Area Network (BAN), i.e. the part of the communication infrastructure that directly interacts with the human body. It should be able to support both the sensing part, connected to the relative data transmission from the person under monitoring to the physician, and the possibility to receive notifications and/or alerts once data is processed. Such technologies are already starting to enter into routine clinical practice. However, novel technologies such as nano-communication, intra/extra body communication, and others open the door for increasingly accurate future diagnostics.

Today, research activity is strongly driven by non-invasive exploration of living bodies. Wide-band reflectometry using adequate antennas system represents one possible way, but sometimes more accuracy can be achieved by the use of implantable sensors that can closely investigate the interested tissues and are able to communicate with the external systems. For some applications, this communication can be unidirectional for monitoring purposes, however the transceiver should be carefully designed to obtain the necessary data while generating as low as possible radiofrequency power within the tissue. The received signal is processed locally or sent to a remote medical center for further processing. The algorithms to extract the information are quite complex, and the low signal-to noise ratio makes the analysis even more challenging. A bi-directional communication on the other hand represents a considerable advancement, when the sensor nodes are remotely controlled based on the feedback of the received data. Nevertheless, the reduced transmitter-receiver distance and the presence of different high-loss tissues introduce strong reflections. Healthcare is very likely the main but not the only application for BANs. Wellness, social interactions, emergency and rescue, as well as military are other important application areas for BANs; all of them would profit from advances in BANs and in how BANs will be developed and deployed in real-working, even large scale, testbeds.

The Special Section in IEEE Access proposes to publish state-of-the-art results in related field to the BAN, as (i) Wearable Computing, (ii) Embedded Devices and Medical Applications, (iii) Communications and Networking, (iv) Systems and Applications, and (v) Antenna Applications and Propagation, that are the main topics of the Bodynets 2016 Conference. Research results in the fields of electronics, medicine, materials science, electromagnetics, signal processing, etc. and more importantly the significance of the inter-disciplinary aspects between them that provides a successful solution are expected to be brought together.

Other related hot topics in the current research community are Antennas and Propagation in Body Area Networks, Body Area NanoNETworks: Electromagnetic, Materials and Communications, Cloud-assisted Body Area Networks, Human Body Communications Millimeter-Wave Body Area Networks, Privacy, Security and Trust in Body Area Networks, Sensors and Algorithms for Human Motion Analysis and Classification, Ultra Wideband for Body Area Networking, just to mention some.

We invite researchers from diverse backgrounds and specializations to contribute original practical and/or review papers tackling challenges related to the topic of this Special Section.

We also highly recommend the submission of multimedia with each article as it significantly increases the visibility, downloads, and citations of articles

Associate Editor: Ladislau Matekovits, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Guest Editors:

  1. Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, Italy
  2. Zhelong Wang Dalian University of Technology, China
  3. Hassan Ghasemzadeh, Washington State University, USA
  4. Valeria Loscrì, INRIA, France
  5. Ildiko Peter, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
  6. Matti Hämäläinen, University of Oulu, Finland

Relevant IEEE Access Special Sections:

  1. Bio-Compatible Devices and Bio-Electromagnetics for Bio-Medical Applications
  2. Optimization for Emerging Wireless Networks: IoT, 5G and Smart Grid Communication Networks
  3. Healthcare Big Data

IEEE Access Editor-in-Chief: Michael Pecht, Professor and Director, CALCE, University of Maryland

Paper submission: Contact Associate Editor and submit manuscript to:
http://ieee.atyponrex.com/journal/ieee-access

For inquiries regarding this Special Section, please contact: Bora M. Onat, Managing Editor, IEEE Access (Phone: (732) 562-6036, specialsections@ieee.org)