A body area networks (BAN) can provide a wide
range of applications in primary for medical healthcare such as
telemetering vital sign, telecontrolling medical equipment, and in
addition for non-medical service such as entertainment. To
harmonize with the strong demands from both medical
healthcare societies and ICT industries, a standardization
committee referred to as IEEE 802.15.6 was formally set up in
December 2007. The objective of 15.6 is to define new physical
(PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers for wireless BAN
(WBAN). This paper introduces a trend of R&D for WBAN and
an overview of standardization in IEEE802.15.6. Some critical
and future works are suggested. A BAN must be a major
successful system to achieve both ubiquitous medical service to
solve medical crisis and global business to create a new market in
medical ICT.