Recent trends in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) research and cognition based adaptive WBAN architecture for healthcare

In healthcare domain, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has transpired as a prominent technology which is capable of providing better methods of real time patient health monitoring at hospitals, asylums and even at their homes. In recent times, WBAN has gained great interest and proved one of the most explored technologies by health care facilities because of its vital role and wide range of application in clinical sciences. WBAN involve communication between very small sensor nodes with frequently changing environment, hence lots of issues still need to be addressed. Some of the major issues are Physical layer issues, interoperability&mobility issue, reliability, resource management, usability, Energy consumption and QoS issues. This research paper includes a comprehensive survey of recent trends in WBAN research, provides prospective solutions to some major issues using cognitive approach and a proposed concept of Cognitive Radio based WBAN architecture. Thus a conventional WBAN architecture can be improvised to an adaptive, more reliable and efficient WBAN system using Cognitive based approach.