5th International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology
		Body Area Network for Medical Treatment and Healthcare – Technologies and Challenges
		Body area network (BAN) appears as an effective and efficient technology to assist medical treatment and healthcare in the sense of reducing working load and expense. BAN is defined as a small scale network that provides short-range wireless connections among devices distributed in, on, and in the peripheral proximity around human body with consideration for human body safety. However, engineers may encounter many challenges when designing a BAN including channel behavior, PHY structure, MAC control, etc. Different organizations worldwide set up projects to provide their unique solutions related to BAN. In this panel session, we invite some key figures who are leading BAN related projects to discuss technologies and challenges for BAN from different view points.
		Panel Chair
Huan-Bang Li Senior Researcher National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan Visiting Professor, the University of Electro-Communications, Japan		Huan-Bang Li received the Dr. of Eng. degree from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan in 1994. Since then, He has been working for the Communications Research Laboratory (now, National Institute of Information and communications Technology: NICT), Japan. His research interests include mobile satellite communication, coded modulation, ultra-wideband (UWB), body area network (BAN), etc. He is now a senior researcher of NICT. From 1999 to 2000, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, CA, USA. He was a Visiting Associate Professor from 2002 to 2009, and has been a Visiting Professor since 2010, at the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan. He currently serves as the vice chairman of IEEE 802.15.6. He received the Young Engineer Award and the Excellent Paper Award of IEICE Japan in 1996 and 1998, respectively, and the Distinguished Patent Award from the Ministry of Science and Technology Agency of Japan in 2000. He authored a book “Block-coded modulations using Viterbi decoding” (in Japanese) in 1999, and co-authored a book “Wireless Body Area Network” in 2010.
		Panelist 1
Ilangko Balasingham Professor, The Interventional Center, Oslo University Hospital, Norway & Institute of Clinical Medicine University of Oslo, Norway & Department of Electronics and Telecommunications Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway		Ilangko Balasingham received MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Telecommunications, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway in 1993 and 1998, respectively, both in signal processing. He performed his Master’s degree thesis at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of California Santa Barbara, USA. From 1998 to 2002, he worked as a Research Scientist developing image and video streaming solutions for mobile handheld devices at Fast Search & Transfer ASA, Oslo, Norway, which is now part of Microsoft Inc. Since 2002 he has been with the Intervention Centre, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway as a Sr. Research Scientist, where he heads the Wireless Sensor Network Research Group. He was appointed as a Professor in Signal Processing in Medical Applications at NTNU in 2006. His research interests include super robust short range communications for both in-body and on-body sensors, body area sensor network, microwave short range sensing (non invasive, remote and continuous estimation of vital signs), and short range localization and tracking sensors, catheters, and micro robots.
Title		UWB Technology for Medical Applications
Abstract		The ultra wideband (UWB) technology promises several interesting characteristics such as ultra-short pulses, low duty cycle, fine time resolutions, very large bandwidth, extremely low power spectral density, excellent propagation, low interference generation and good interference rejection, coexistence with conventional systems, almost undetectable, combined communications, localization and sensing, and multi-path resistance (useful in hostile environment). Furthermore the technology can be used for improved wireless health technology, for both improved network communication and improved and possibly novel medical applications. Three major research directions are pursued in the MELODY project, which is a large scale Norwegian ICT project with a funding approximately € 1 million pr. year for up to 7 years, namely short range sensing and imaging, improved sensitivity for short range localization and tracking objects, and distributed signal and communications for dynamic autonomous networks for both in-vivo and ex-vivo medical applications. This presentation will provide status on some of the ongoing research work and results from the MELODY project and some of the other emerging medial applications specifically in therapy.
		Panelist 2
Eryk Dutkiewicz Professor, Wireless Communications and Networking Lab., Macquarie University Australia		Eryk Dutkiewicz is a professor of wireless communications at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has over 20 years of industrial and academic research experience. From 1999 to 2004 he worked for Motorola Labs where he managed a wireless research laboratory. Since returning to academia in 2004 he has worked closely with industry partners including Motorola, Agere Systems, Freescale Semiconductor, Infineon and CSIRO on projects involving wireless sensor networks, mesh networks, ultra-wideband technologies, LTE networks and medical body area networks. He is currently the Director of the Wireless Communications and Networking Laboratory at Macquarie University. He also holds visiting appointments at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is an author of over 100 research papers and several book chapters.
Title		Challenges of interference mitigation in medical body area networks
Abstract		The growing cost of healthcare and the aging population in developed countries have introduced great challenges for governments, healthcare providers and healthcare industry. There is great interest in using emerging wireless technologies to support remote patient monitoring in an unobtrusive, reliable and cost effective manner thereby providing personalized sustainable services to patients. Medical Body Area Networks (MBANs) is one such emerging technology that has the potential to significantly improve health care delivery, diagnostic monitoring, disease-tracking and related medical procedures. A crucial aspect of MBANs is their ability to provide highly reliable communications for medical devices, especially those implanted in the human body. Effective radio interference mitigation is crucial to achieving highly reliable and low power operation for implant communications. Interference can be caused by legacy systems that operate in the same frequency bands or by other MBANs operating at the same frequency and in the same location. In some countries, such as Australia, MBANs do not have a protected frequency spectrum and need to operate as secondary spectrum users. This is a very challenging environment for their reliable operation. The other source of interference for MBANs will come from other overlapping MBANs. Both interference caused by legacy systems and inter-MBAN interference make interference mitigation an important research issue. Radio interference issues must be therefore well understood and interference mitigation algorithms and techniques must be effectively supported by emerging protocols.
		Panelist 3
Kiyoshi Hamaguchi Group Leader of Medical ICT Group, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan		Kiyoshi Hamaguchi received the D.Eng. degree from Osaka University, Japan, in 2000. Since 1993 he has been with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan, where he has been engaged in research and development on wireless telecommunication systems. He is currently a leader of the Medical ICT Group in New Generation Wireless Research Centre in NICT.
Title		Body Area Network: Introduction of Research on a New Generation Tele-health System in NICT
Abstract		By the arrival of aged society in our countries, an information and communications technology (ICT) is expected to contribute medical and healthcare fields, e.g., a medical radio equipment senses our vital information - blood pressure, SpO2, body temperature, cardiac beats, body motion etc. -, and send the data to a doctor to get medical treatment. In our medical ICT group of NICT, the possibility and the profit of wireless ICT in the medical and healthcare fields, especially a wireless body area network (BAN) system, are being examined. Recent activities of medical ICT research, BAN applications at home, and NICT’s Ubiquitous Home Project are briefly introduced in my talk.
		Panelist 4
Kamran Sayrafian Program Manager, Information Technology Laboratory, NIST, USA & Adjunct Professor University of Maryland		Kamran Sayrafian is a program manager at the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) located in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He leads several strategic projects that are focused on Pervasive Computing technologies in Healthcare. He holds Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Maryland, Villanova University and Sharif University of Technology, respectively. Prior to joining NIST, he was the cofounder of Zagros Networks, Inc. a fabless semiconductor company based in Rockville, Maryland where he served as President and senior member of the architecture team. Dr. Sayrafian is the co-inventor/inventor of four U.S. patents. He is a senior member of IEEE and an adjunct faculty of the University of Maryland. He has served as invited member of technical program committee and co-chair of many international conferences and workshops. His research interests include body area networks, mobile sensor networks and RF-based indoor positioning. He has published over 50 conference and journal papers, and book chapters in these areas. He was the recipient of the IEEE PIMRC 2009 best paper award and he has also been recognized as the outstanding faculty of 2010 at the University of Maryland. He is a contributing member and the co-editor of the channel modeling document of the IEEE802.15.6 international standardization on body area networks.
Title		Visualizing RF Propagation in Body Area Networks Using a 3D Immersive Platform
Abstract		Body area networks which consist of RF-enabled wearable and implantable sensory nodes are poised to be a promising interdisciplinary technology with novel uses in pervasive health information technology. For any communication system, clear understanding of the propagation media is a key step toward a successful transceiver design. Such information is typically gathered by conducting physical experiments, measuring and processing the corresponding data to obtain channel characteristics. Due to the nature of the body area networks, doing extensive physical measurements might be difficult or in some cases not even possible. Here, we present a 3D virtual reality platform that can provide an effective alternative to complement physical experimentation. Several examples are provided to show the intriguing capabilities of the system to study and observe propagation characteristics from implants, creeping waves around the human body and possible effect of metallic implants on body surface propagation.
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