Driven by the confluence between the need to
collect data about people’s physical, physiological, psychological,
cognitive, and behavioral processes in spaces ranging from
personal to urban and the recent availability of the technologies
that enable this data collection, wireless sensor networks for
healthcare have emerged in the recent years. In this review, we
present some representative applications in the healthcare
domain and describe the challenges they introduce to wireless
sensor networks due to the required level of trustworthiness
and the need to ensure the privacy and security ofmedical data.
These challenges are exacerbated by the resource scarcity that
is inherent with wireless sensor network platforms. We outline
prototype systems spanning application domains from physiological
and activitymonitoring to large-scale physiological and
behavioral studies and emphasize ongoing research challenges