DT-WBAN: Disruption tolerant wireless body area networks in healthcare applications

Delay or disruption tolerant protocols can be used in several application areas. In the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) or healthcare, these protocols are well-suited to provide a seamless handover between online and offline monitoring of vital parameters or activity data; this also implies a synchronization of offline gathered data. In this paper, we analyze the expected data rates for several medical sensors and applications and give an insight into how to dimension such disruption tolerant protocols and systems. We also developed a scenario for activity recognition in which we constantly monitor the acceleration data of a wearable sensor node. We implemented and evaluated this scenario with our disruption tolerant protocol for wireless sensor nodes and show its overall functionality, its utility, and its limits.