Enhancing sustainable healthcare practices through energy-efficient wireless body area networks

Abstract

This paper explores how the integration and performance of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) contribute to sustainable healthcare practices. WBANs play a crucial role in reducing the environmental footprint of healthcare systems by providing continuous monitoring that can prevent unnecessary hospitalizations and reduce the consumption of disposable medical supplies. Additionally, the design of WBANs using environmentally friendly materials, low-power devices, and recyclable components is discussed to optimize the sustainability of healthcare practices. To enhance infrastructure, services, and quality of life, new technologies have been integrated to improve WBANs. Patients' essential health data may be continuously and instantly collected thanks to these networks, and healthcare providers can receive the data right away for quick analysis and action. WBANs have healthcare benefits, but there are also major drawbacks. Technologies that can combine low power consumption, minimal delay, and high enough data rates are needed for WBANs in order to support a variety of medical applications. The effectiveness of the LoRaWAN and IEEE 802.15.6 technologies in WBAN is assessed in this paper. With the use of seven crucial metrics which are throughput, arrival rate, delay, energy consumption, residual energy, network lifetime, and packet delivery ratio (PDR), this paper seeks to study which technology is appropriate with WBANs using NS3 as a simulation program. With network parameters, 1000 seconds, and 50 nodes, the paper evaluated the performance of each technology. The results show that IEEE 802.15.6 is superior in terms of throughput, PDR, and arrival rate whereas LoRaWAN is superior in terms of energy consumption, residual energy, network lifetime, and delay.