Wireless sensor and data transmission needs and technologies for patient monitoring in the operating room and intensive care unit

Abstract

In the intensive care unit, or during anesthesia, patients are attached to monitors by cables. These cables obstruct nursing staff and hinder the patients from moving freely in the hospital. However, rapidly developing wireless technologies are expected to solve these problems. To this end, this study revealed problem areas in current patient monitoring and established the most important medical parameters to monitor. In addition, usable wireless techniques for short-range data transmission were explored and currently employed wireless applications in the hospital environment were studied. The most important parameters measured of the patient include blood pressures, electrocardiography, respiration rate, heart rate and temperature. Currently used wireless techniques in hospitals are based on the WMTS and WLAN standards. There are no viable solutions for short-range data transmission from patient sensors to patient monitors, but potentially usable techniques in the future are based on the WPAN standards. These techniques include Bluetooth, ZigBee and UWB. Other suitable techniques might be based on capacitive or inductive coupling. The establishing of wireless techniques depends on ensuring the reliability of data transmission, eliminating disturbance by other wireless devices, ensuring patient data security and patient safety, and lowering the power consumption and price.

Outage probability performance in mobile indoor Optical Wireless Communication environment

“…The floor reflectivity (denoted by floor ) and the ceiling one are set to 0.8 as in previous studies [6]. The results are obtained for a data rate R b = 500kbps which is an upper bound of required data rates in healthcare context [7]. In each configuration, the emitted power is set to 70mW, which is the minimal value required to reach a 10 -3 P out for a 10 -9 BER 0 (corresponding to SNR 0 =15.6dB).…”

“…Considering the classical data rates for healthcare monitoring (lower than 1 Mbps) [7], we suppose in this study that the optical channel is a slow-flat fading one [1] and that it is mainly characterized by its static gain H. The electrical Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) at the receiver is directly linked to the H value, for a transmission data rate R b as:…”

WiCop: Engineering WiFi Temporal White-Spaces for Safe Operations of Wireless Body Area Networks in Medical Applications

“…al. [30] reveals problem areas in patient monitoring when applying Bluetooth, ZigBee and UWB to vital sign monitoring in ICU and operating rooms. Chipara et.…”

Static Verification of Wireless Sensor Networks with Formal Methods

“…detection of fires in forests), structural monitoring of civil engineering structures [1] and in medical scenarios (e.g. health monitoring) [2], [3]. WSN are dynamic systems, exposed to several threats due to the unreliability of the wireless medium, the limited energy budget, the deployment into harsh environments, and the cheap hardware adopted [4].…”