The 2nd International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology (ISMICT’07) IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES FOR WIRELESS MEDICAL DEVICES

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power integrated circuits, and wireless communications have enabled the design of low-cost, miniature, lightweight, and intelligent physiological sensor nodes. Being capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs, these nodes can be seamlessly integrated into wireless personal or body area networks (WPANs or WBANs, respectively) for health monitoring. These networks promise to revolutionize health care by allowing inexpensive, noninvasive, continuous, ambulatory health monitoring with almost real-time updates of medical records via the Internet. Though a number of ongoing research efforts are focusing on various technical, economic, and social issues, many technical hurdles still need to be resolved in order to have flexible, reliable, secure, and power-efficient WBANs suitable for medical applications. This paper discusses implementation issues and describes the authors’ prototype sensor network for health monitoring that utilizes off-the-shelf 802.15.4 compliant network nodes. The paper presents performance analysis for different health care equipment for 6LoWPAN based wireless network.