# A Software Defined Radio Evaluation Platform for WBAN Systems
## 1 Introduction  
Based on the data provided by the Canadian Institution for Health Information (CIHI), the average health expenditure for every individual in Canada was 6604 Canadian dollars in 2017, which requires 11.5% of the overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), up from only 7% of the GDP in 1975. In other words, Canadians spent 4.5% more of their wealth on healthcare over the past 43 years [1]. Meanwhile, according to the report provided by [PERSON] from the Fraser Institute [2], the average waiting time for consulting medical professionals was 21.2 weeks in 2017 in Canada due to the shortage of medical professionals, even though they have spent a huge amount of their income on healthcare. Therefore, there is a strong demand for an economical and efficient healthcare solution, which is capable of also addressing the shortage of medical professionals. One such solution can be a secured intelligent healthcare system, which can not only monitor the physical conditions of the patients remotely, but also analyze the potential physical issues the patients are facing and provide feedback to them, as demonstrated in Figure 1.  
By benefiting from the rapid development of modern technology, increasing types of biomedical data can be collected from patients and transmitted to the cloud for further data processing and storage. This is especially true with the rapid growth in advanced biomedical sensors, such as Electroencephalogram (EEG) and Electrocardiography (ECG) sensors [3] and blood pressure sensors [4], as well as wireless networking, such as the Fifth Generation (5G) cellular mobile standards and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). However, there are two potential issues that still restrict the development of intelligent healthcare systems [5; 6]. First, the sensors on humans are extremely power-sensitive, especially the implanted sensors with limited power supply and the inconvenience of battery change. The most commonly-utilized wireless communication technologies in the proposed sensors are Bluetooth and ZigBee, which are not dedicated and optimized for biomedical data transmission. Secondly, the data collected from patients are private and critical, which could cause serious problems if the information were tampered with. Hence, an efficient and unique security scheme is also necessary for wireless communications in the intelligent healthcare system. WBANs, illustrated in Figure 2, have attracted huge academic and industrial attention in recent years because they define the shared communication infrastructure for wireless data transmission between sensors and other devices. Starting in 2012, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) released the 802.15.6 standard, which specifies and regulates the detailed configurations of WBANs. Based on the specifications of the IEEE 802.15.6 standard, multiple hardware-based and software-based implementations of WBAN have been proposed [7; 8; 9]. The evaluation results of the implementations illustrate that WBAN has advantages in power consumption, privacy protection, and efficient communication for biomedical data. For instance, the power consumption of WBAN systems is between 0.1 mW-5 mW approximately when the transmitting data rate is 1 Mbps, while for the same transmitting data rate, Bluetooth consumes between 5 mW and 100 mW approximately. In this case, the battery can last approximately one year in WBAN systems, while it can only last less than a month in Bluetooth systems [5], as illustrated in Table 1.  
However, since the IEEE 802.15.6 standard supports three types of communications (Narrowband (NB), Ultra Wideband (UWB), and Human Body Communication (HBC)) and each communication corresponds to various transmission specifications such as encoding methods,  
Figure 1: Architecture of an intelligent healthcare system. modulations, and transmission frequencies, the designs were implemented in different platforms for evaluation purposes. However, evaluating different implementations of WBAN in various platforms could cause certain issues.