Link-level reliability control for wireless electrocardiogram monitoring in indoor hospital

Reliability is an essential quality of safety-critical wireless systems for medical applications. However, wireless links are typically prone to bursts of errors, with characteristics which vary over time. We propose a wireless system suitable for realtime remote patient monitoring in which the necessary reliability is achieved by an efficient error control in the link layer. We have paired an example electrocardiography application to this wireless system. We also developed a tool chain to determine the reliability, in terms of the packet-delivery ratio, for various combinations of system parameters. A realistic case study, based on data from the MIT-BIT arrhythmia database, shows that the proposed wireless system can achieve an appropriate level of reliability for electrocardiogram monitoring if link-level error control is correctly implemented.