Medical applications of wireless networks pdf

In practical and researching domain, WiMAX has various deployment scenarios. On a large scale, WiMAX networks can be established and operated by a regional health authority to provide telemedicine services among regional clinics, hospitals and drugstores. On a smaller scale, such as hospital-size area, WiMAX networks can be used to provide an intranet for the hospital. This will not only trim down the deployment cost significantly but also enhance the quality of the network. As mentioned above, the other application of WiMAX-based network is prehospital management service.

The first and oldest wireless technology used in medical application is wireless local area network WLAN.

The capacities of IEEE After the introducing of Sine that time, Many extensions of By using this transmission media, communication between departments within hospitals, from hospital to hospital can be made on the fly. WLAN are widely used in telemedicine, healthcare data transmission, and many other applications which will be discussed in the later sections. WPANs using Zigbee or Bluetooth standards are gaining in popularity, with wireless motes available from industry.

A number of physiological monitoring systems based on the motes have been proposed and deployed in real clinical settings. In addition to patient monitoring these systems can be used for patient tracking in situations where location information is essential, such as mass casualty incidents. The data rate is defined at kbps per user.

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Time division multiplexing technique divides the channel in to micro second slots, times RF hopping per second. Working in one of three transmission mode, from which have transmission output powers are 20dBm,4dBm and 0dbm with range from m to 10m respectively, Bluetooth is a technology designed for cable replacement and short distance ad-hoc connectivity.

A Bluetooth network, a so-called piconet can be formed by a master, up to 8 active slaves and up to parked slaves. The standard is an ultra-low power, low-data rate which is used for monitoring and controlling applications. The number of nodes in a network can be as many as nodes. With many advantages including low-power consumption, small size, simple protocol, wide compatibility, and so on, WPAN is applied to many medical applications including telemedicine system, pervasive and continuous patients monitoring and wireless-integrated medical devices. For example, in a mass casualty or disaster, medics can place tiny sensors on each patient to form an ad hoc network using Bluetooth, relaying continuous vital sign data to multiple receiving devices e.

PDAs carried by physicians, or laptop base stations in ambulances [ Shnayder05 ]. Many other applications of Bluetooth and Zigbee in medical application will be discussed in the later sections. With the advancement of wireless technology, wireless devices can be used to reduce medical errors, increase medical care quality, improve the efficiency of caregivers, lessen the caregiver-lacking situation, and improve the comfort of patients.

Although the technology has found ways into various fields, medical domain has very strict quality and assurance requirements, which causes many challenges that are faced when implementing and operating the systems.

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The following part of the paper will be reserved to identify potentials and challenges of healthcare system using wireless technology. Using WBAN technologies to transmit data from monitoring devices, such as Capsule Endoscope [ Takizawa08 ], to outside body, these applications used to monitor the digestive organs such as the small intestine by video or successive image data.

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The system uses IEEE Details about Capsule Endoscope will be given in the later section of paper. These signs can be obtained by applying to the patient adhesive electrodes so that the signs are transmitted over wires to display monitors. Moreover, the adhesive can be detached from patient what is caused by strong enough impact to the wires. Although real-time patient monitoring field is not a new topic in wireless medical applications, researchers and industries are investing a lot of effort and money to it.

These applications basically use biomedical sensors monitor the physiological signals of patients such as electro-cardiogram ECG , blood oxygen level, blood pressures, blood glucose, coagulation, body weight, heart rate, EMG, ECG, oxygen saturation, etc.

Home monitoring systems for chronic and elderly patients is rapidly growing up in quantity and quality [ Otto06 ]. Using the system can reduce the hospital stay of patient and increase patient safety and mobility. The system collects periodic and continuous data and then transmits it to the centralized server.

These applications save large amount of time for doctors as well as patients. The doctors can monitor several patients simultaneously which is can not be done by traditional monitoring, in which the patients are monitored directly by the doctors. The patients are no longer required to be present at the hospitals periodically. Wireless sensor network can be applied to medical applications to build up databases for long-term clinical uses [ McLoughlin06 ]. It also can be used for emergency medical care [ VitalDust ] and many other applications.

The section presented the fields that wireless networks can contribute. The following part will identify challenge of deploying wireless networks based solutions in medical care. The use of wireless technologies in medical environments is bringing major advantages to the existing healthcare services. However, these have several key research challenges such as various types of network communication infrastructure[ VitalDust ], fault-tolerance, data integrity, low-power consumption, transmission delay[ Natarajan07 ], node failure, etc. Reliability is one of the most important factors in a successful healthcare system.

To ensure this factor, system designers have to care about adaptation of nodes when its location, connection and link quality is changed [ Soomro07 ]. Different network communications infrastructure should be used in appropriate situation. For example, with high-risk patients, the services with higher QoS should be used. The integrity of distributed data system and fault-tolerance should be given a proper consideration also. Every device can operate differently at different times, especially sensor-based devices. One node in a system can be failure at anytime for number of reason including natural issues, human-related issues or batteries exhaustion.

Ensuring a seamless service during life time of the system could be a big challenge. How to manage the transmission delay of various types of communications in the system is an undoubted challenge. With the system using WBAN or wireless sensor network, data must go through a number of hops before it reaches the sink. In addition, these hops are sometime located in very critical conditions, such as magnetic field or areas bearing interference of radio waves.

As a result, various delays occur and require extra effort of system designer to synchronize the whole system. In many mission critical applications, it is vital that devices do not fall into battery exhaustion. As the mater of fact, most wireless network based devices are battery operated; therefore, the design of a system must not require devices to expend excessive energy.

The mentioned challenges are associated with technical implementation [ Stankovic05 ]. However, there are many other challenges associated with deployment of a new technology. Specifically, the new system should be low cost and not interfere with existing infrastructure. So managing interference between the old system and the new one and using spectrum properly are challenges of wireless technology applied to medical applications.

Therefore, the applications must be not only helpful but also unobtrusive, specifically small, lightweight, etc. Power and process availability of wireless-based network is very limited while to ensure privacy of information, extra power and computation must be used to encrypt transmitted data.

Thus guaranteeing information security can be an issue and challenge for system developers. Many challenges for wireless medical system designers and developers are discussed in this section. These issues could be a motivation for developers to create the better solutions. The next section of the paper will be reserved to discuss standards used in wireless medical applications. Back to Table of Contents. Coming along with a rapid increase of wireless systems for medical applications, significant academic and corporate resources are being directed towards development of standards.

In this section, we will identify some standards that have been developed or are currently being developed in the research community for the wireless medical care.


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The standards classify devices using conceptual model shown in Figure 3. Figure 3: Conceptual model for Xbased medical devices [ Yao05 ]. Some other IEEE standards are:. A Bluetooth profile provides guideline of how different applications use Bluetooth wireless technology to set up a connection and exchange data. The profile is developed by the Medical Devices Working Group to ensure that devices used in medical, health and fitness applications can transfer data between devices in a secure and well defined way via Bluetooth wireless technology.

The standard and its sub-standards provide guide for telecommunication practices, required performance standards to support all of the functions of community EMSS. In addition, the standards identify state planning goals and objectives for EMSS communications.

The standards can be used for designing, integrating, evaluating and coordinating telecommunications resources in order to guarantee providing needed functions of EMSS systems. Some ASTM standards used in wireless medical system:. Many other standards are currently being developed in the research community. The demand of up-to-dated standards is inevitable with the rapid development of wireless medical care.