Trends and standardization of body area network (BAN) for medical healthcare

A body area networks (BAN) can provide a wide range of applications in primary for medical healthcare such as telemetering vital sign, telecontrolling medical equipment, and in addition for non-medical service such as entertainment. To harmonize with the strong demands from both medical healthcare societies and ICT industries, a standardization committee referred to as IEEE 802.15.6 was formally set up in December 2007. The objective of 15.6 is to define new physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers for wireless BAN (WBAN). This paper introduces a trend of R & D for WBAN and an overview of standardization in IEEE802.15.6. Some critical and future works are suggested. A BAN must be a major successful system to achieve both ubiquitous medical service to solve medical crisis and global business to create a new market in medical ICT.