## 7 Conclusions  
mHealth, enabled by mobile phones and other wireless computing devices, is promising to bring a revolutionary adoption of new communication patterns in healthcare. The non-intrusive health monitoring of patient's vital signs over wireless body area networks (WBANs) provides a cost-effective solution to the healthcare system. Currently, WBAN technology is being widely investigated and is still in its primitive stage. This technology could lead to the realisation of such concepts as mHealth in the future. However, before the WBAN can be widely used in long term monitoring of the patients' health, one needs to address the difficult power consumption constraints. In this work we presented some novel approaches for power optimisation within a WBAN. A novel, signal-oriented WBAN approach is presented, and the method of standardising the WUR in WBAN environment is investigated. Finally we propose a WhMAC protocol, which is a WUR enabled--signal oriented low power protocol, intended to be used for physiological signal monitoring in medical or home settings, for both high data rate or low data rate sensor applications.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l l l l l} \hline \hline \multicolumn{1}{c}{\multirow{2}{*}{**Power Consumption Constituents**}} & \multicolumn{4}{c}{**Measurement period**} \\ \cline{2-7}  & **1 h** & **30 min** & **1 min** & **10 s** & **1 s** \\ \hline
1 & Data transmission power & \(0.045\) & \(0.09\) & \(2.73\) & \(16.23\) & \(162.73\) \\
2 & Microcontroller power & \(0.007\) & \(0.014\) & \(0.41\) & \(2.44\) & \(24.5\) \\
3 & WUR power & \(0.27\) & \(0.27\) & \(0.27\) & \(0.27\) \\
4 & ADF7020 OFF mode power & \(0.3\) & \(0.3\) & \(0.3\) & \(0.3\) \\
5 & MSP430F5 xx LPM 4.5 & \(0.52\) & \(0.52\) & \(0.52\) & \(0.52\) \\
6 & MSP430F5 xx LPM 3 & \(7.8\) & \(7.8\) & \(7.8\) & \(7.8\) \\
7 & ADF7020 and MSP430 TDMA power & \(7.85\) & \(7.85\) & \(7.85\) & \(7.85\) \\ \hline A & whMAC \((1+2+3+4+5)\) & \(1.142\) & \(1.194\) & \(4.23\) & \(19.76\) & \(188.32\) \\ B & Protocol [27]\((1+2+4+6+7)\) & \(16.002\) & \(16.054\) & \(19.09\) & \(34.62\) & \(203.18\) \\ \hline C & Power reduction coefficient & \(14.01\) & \(13.45\) & \(4.51\) & \(1.75\) & \(1.08\) \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
* Values for rows 1–7 and rows A and B are in \(\mu\mathrm{W}\).  
\end{table}
Table 4: Protocol Comparisons.  
As the WUR enables a power-efficient event-driven wireless environment, it is possible to turn physiological data into medical information through the provision of an accurate, reliable and very low power WBAN in-network processing solution for respiration rate, heart rate, pulse, blood oxygen level measurements using off-the-shelf ECG, SpO2 and accelerometer sensors. One of the possible implementations of the protocol can be an E-MEWS system (wireless electronic early warning score in medical admissions) [28], where some health parameters are extracted at regular time intervals, and depending on their values, the patient's health condition is graded from normal to critical. Further usage can be for home monitoring of a patient, if the sensors are small enough to be worn for a long period of time.  
Although primarily aimed at medical devices, the proposed system can also be used in consumer healthcare, sports and fitness applications, the home care and elderly assisted living, entertainment, interactive gaming, smart power supplies, energy harvesters, _etc_.