The reliable and efficient operation of emergency healthcare (e-emergency) services poses quality demands to the systems and underlying communication infrastructures. In this context, most existing wireless body sensor networks fall short in meeting these demands as they only offer an unreliable service delivery. e-Emergency systems must provide quality of service (QoS) support so that a pervasive and trustable assistance is provided to patients under health risk. This paper discusses the need for QoS in wireless e-health and e-emergency services. To demonstrate this need, some current and relevant e-health projects with QoS requirements are presented. The study reveals the importance of providing QoS support in this emerging field of application and provides a summary characterizing the e-health proposals herein presented.

Ambient Assisted Living is pushing the development of innovative wireless monitoring solutions. Most of the available solutions are based on well known wireless communication standards, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or ZigBee. Moreover, there are also a few proprietary solutions, including those designed specifically for biomedical monitoring applications. The success of those solutions depends on many factors, and power autonomy is one key issue, since system recharging requires the user to temporarily remove the device. In this paper, we evaluate the autonomy of three different wireless modules, proposed for use on Ambient Assisted Living applications. We present the measured and expected autonomy for modules built from off-the-shelf components to assess its suitability for real scenario applications. From the results, it is evident that may be worthless to design extremely low power acquisition electronics, sacrificing the acquisition performance, when the main power consumption comes from the wireless subsystem that, which is one order of magnitude higher.

It is expected in a near future that safety applications based on vehicle-to-everything communications will be a common reality in the traffic roads. This technology will contribute to improve the safety of vulnerable road users, for example, with the use of virtual traffic light systems (VTLS) in the intersections. This work implements and evaluates a VTLS conceived to help the pedestrians pass safely the intersections without real traffic lights. The simulated VTLS scenario used two distinct communication paradigms—the pull and push communication models. The pull model was implemented in named data networking (NDN), because NDN uses natively a pull-based communication model, where consumers send requests to pull the contents from the provider. A distinct approach is followed by the push-based model, where consumers subscribe previously the information, and then the producers distribute the available information to those consumers. Comparing the performance of the push and pull models on a VANET with VTLS, it is observed that the push mode presents lower packet loss and generates fewer packets, and consequently occupies less bandwidth, than the pull mode. In fact, for the considered metrics, the VTLS implemented with the pull mode presents no advantage when compared with the push mode.

This work presents a study on the reconfiguration requirements of wireless sensor network for biomedical applications. It is presented a wireless platform operating in a smart suit, the required monitored parameters and possible monitoring scenarios. The smart suit is currently used only for one scenario, which consists of monitoring handicapped people, with all physiological data being collected and routed to a base station. We propose using the smart suit for different scenarios, such as a patient requiring emergency medical care. The goal is to use the sensorial network in the suit to monitor his health condition, so that the cardio-respiratory rhythm, body temperature, and arterial pressure data can be used to help the diagnostic. We state that this network can be used if reconfigured correctly. This paper also shows that sensors here in use should control external high resolution ADCs using hardware interruptions instead of software interruptions.