Body Area Networks
Imagine complete health and wellness monitoring systems that go wherever you go. Systems capable of monitoring your heart, brain and vital signs round the clock without disrupting your daily life. Such systems could revolutionize patient care for countless conditions including coronary disease, epilepsy and sleep disorders. Similar systems could also help sports people optimize their training and enable adaptive building / environment control to maximize comfort levels.
This is the goal of our Body Area Network (BAN) technology integration program. The program is developing BAN applications for human-centric health and comfort monitoring. This involves:
- evaluating existing technologies
- assessing requirements for specific health and wellness applications
- creating small, low-power BAN platforms
- building technology demonstrators
- demonstrating application concepts
In particular, the program has already created a number of proof-of-concept prototypes including:
- Low-power (1 mW) multi-purpose sensor node
- Wireless, low-power ECG patch
- Body heat-powered EEG and pulse oximeter system
- 2-, 6-, and 25-channel ExG systems
- Wearable EMG belt
- Wireless emotion monitoring system
- BAN for sleep monitoring
A real end-to-end effort, the program features partners from a wide range of specialties. This includes health systems manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies and semiconductor / electronics companies. The program also has close ties with leading clinical groups in sleep, epilepsy and stroke therapy – enabling many prototypes to be evaluated in small pilot studies. Moreover, it plays a key role in Holst Centre’s activities in the Smiling project (part of the EU’s 7th framework) and other EU-funded initiatives.