Survey of RF Communications and Sensing Convergence Research <s> D. MEDICAL SENSORS AND MONITORING <s> In this paper, we propose a tactile sensing element that communicates through two dimensional conductive skin layers without individual wires. Each tactile element has sensors and signal processors, and it broadcasts coded tactile signals through a couple of conductive layers. Since the conductive layers can be used for both the electrical power supply and the communication, simply sandwiching the chips between the layers completes electrical connection of tactile sensing chips. Since no metal wires exist, the skin is elastic and tough. High-resolution sensor skins can be easily fabricated in various shapes. In addition, because the tactile elements transmit the locally detected stress data with coded signals, we can obtain high-SN-ratio data from a very small sensing element put at a remote location. This paper describes the skin structure, the communication architecture, the structure of the sensing chip, and the results of basic experiments. <s> BIB001 </s> Survey of RF Communications and Sensing Convergence Research <s> D. MEDICAL SENSORS AND MONITORING <s> Spatially distributed sensor nodes can be used to monitor systems and humans conditions in a wide range of application domains. A network of body sensors in a community of people generates large amounts of contextual data that requires a scalable approach for storage and processing. Cloud computing can provide a powerful, scalable storage and processing infrastructure to perform both online and offline analysis and mining of body sensor data streams. This paper presents BodyCloud, a system architecture based on Cloud Computing for the management and monitoring of body sensor data streams. It incorporates key concepts such as scalability and flexibility of resources, sensor heterogeneity, and the dynamic deployment and management of user and community applications. <s> BIB002 </s> Survey of RF Communications and Sensing Convergence Research <s> D. MEDICAL SENSORS AND MONITORING <s> Nowadays, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have been used in several important areas, such as healthcare, military, critical infrastructure monitoring, environment monitoring, and manufacturing. However, due to the limitations of WSNs in terms of memory, energy, computation, communication, and scalability, efficient management of the large number of WSNs data in these areas is an important issue to deal with. There is a need for a powerful and scalable high-performance computing and massive storage infrastructure for real-time processing and storing of the WSN data as well as analysis (online and offline) of the processed information under context using inherently complex models to extract events of interest. In this scenario, cloud computing is becoming a promising technology to provide a flexible stack of massive computing, storage, and software services in a scalable and virtualized manner at low cost. Therefore, in recent years, Sensor-Cloud infrastructure is becoming popular that can provide an open, flexible, and reconfigurable platform for several monitoring and controlling applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of representative works on Sensor-Cloud infrastructure, which will provide general readers an overview of the Sensor-Cloud platform including its definition, architecture, and applications. The research challenges, existing solutions, and approaches as well as future research directions are also discussed in this paper. <s> BIB003
Medical devices are often deeply embedded biologically, and therefore operate at lower power. However, sensing is often a primary function of such devices, which can require significant power to complete effectively. Cloud based approaches have evolved where sensing elements communicate their measurements to external processing structures for further analysis BIB002 . This topology extends to non-medical applications as well, encapsulating deeply embedded low power sensor applications BIB003 . The need for combined sensing and communicating naturally arises in these systems, and to do so on a single radio is especially advantageous to minimize the invasiveness and physical footprint of medical implants. Getting a communications signal out of the body has its challenges as well, and researchers have begun looking at devices to estimate and equalize the human body channel prior to transferring data BIB001 .