Zigbee network for remote patient monitoring on general hospital wards

Availability of Zigbee-based sensor network technology with low-power consuming sensors has made their implementation in healthcare possible, particularly for remote patient monitoring. Two alternative approaches for the deployment of Zigbee-based wireless personal area networks (WPANs) for remote patient monitoring on general wards are discussed and their performances evaluated in a simulation environment. In the first approach, a single WPAN is considered for gathering and transmitting physiological data from the patients on a ward. In the second approach, which is proposed in this paper, multiple WPANs are considered instead. In this approach, a WPAN will be allocated to each patient on the ward. The simulation results show that the multiple WPANs approach out-performed the single one in respect of efficiency and reliability for data transmission for the entire ward.