ETSI releases specification for Smart Body Area Networks to facilitate eHealth

Sophia Antipolis,  20 May 2019

The ETSI Technical Committee Smart BAN has recently published ETSI TS 103 327, a standard for Smart Body Area Networks.

It establishes standardized service and application interfaces and facilitators, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and infrastructure for interoperability management and offers secure interaction and access to any SmartBAN data or entities. The resulting SmartBAN reference architecture is a global and integrated IoT reference architecture, oneM2M and Multi-Agent-based. The architecture is provided with cross-functional components for allowing non SmartBAN enabled environments to interoperate with SmartBAN and addresses network, syntactic, informational and semantic interoperability.

SmartBAN uses a set of low-power embedded devices, mainly sensors, wearables or actuators, to collect and monitor vital data of a human being and their environment, but not exclusively. This ETSI specification will enable, for instance, each patient coming to an emergency room to have their medical history already available, which should lead to an intelligent and accurate intervention.

The SmartBAN reference architecture is managing semantic interoperability through in particular everything as a service (XaaS) mechanisms and a Web of Things (WoT) strategy, which will enable cooperation between different SmartBANs. It should lead to the creation of new cross-domain applications in order to integrate SmartBANs into the Web of Things and more global scenarios. On the service and application side, generic service enablers and standardized APIs will provide secure interaction and access to SmartBAN data or entities (data transfer and sharing mechanisms included), embedded semantic analytics (device/edge/fog levels), automated alarm management, distributed monitoring or control operations.

This is a first step towards horizontal management of Body Area Networks in multiple vertical application areas.