Ambulatory monitoring and health care using wireless sensor networks is an active area of applied research. The general network topology used for wireless body area networks is the star topology with the sensor nodes sending their data to a central processing node for data fusion. Reliability of these networks is very important since they deal with human life. Reported applications have had performance and reliability problems. In this paper, several reported applications of wireless body area networks are reviewed and the reliability of a sample WBAN is computed.

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