Wireless communication systems for continuous multiparameter health monitoring

Continuous multiparameter health monitoring has applications in telemedicine, rehabilitation, home care, sport, firefighting and other life-threatening situations. Current implementations rely on wires for data collection, energy distribution and management, and measure synchronization. These wires make the products more difficult to use, uncomfortable and less reliable. Although energy distribution and management can be dealt with at the sensor level, a wireless link must still address numerous challenges: reliability, low power consumption, low latency, robustness to interference, coexistence... Some of these problems have been addressed by research in communication protocols for wireless sensor networks. At the physical layer, Ultra Wideband technologies such as Impulse Radio, Chirp UWB and FM-UWB are promising in terms of power consumption and are considered by the IEEE 802.15.6 Body Area Network standardization task group. This paper evaluates the replacement of wires in a prototype medical body area network by wireless data links. Two solutions are compared in terms of reliability, power consumption and latency. The first is based on FM-UWB and the other one on a narrow band radio. Both rely on WiseMAC, an ultra low power medium access control protocol for wireless sensor networks. It is shown that FM-UWB offers a lower power consumption when compared to a narrow band radio transceiver. WiseMAC is shown to maintain high packet success rates and low power consumption even when handling traffic rates higher than what it had been designed for. The combination of FM-UWB and WiseMAC is thus a good choice for medical body area networks that require ultra low power consumption and high robustness to interference.