Comparing Bluetooth HDP and SPP for Mobile Health Devices

The Bluetooth SIG recently released the Health Device Profile (HDP) in an effort to standardize health device communication using Bluetooth technology. HDP uses the IEEE 11073-20601 Data Exchange Protocol as the transport content. The same traffic can be sent using the popular Serial Port Profile (SPP), but this profile is not configured for health device communication. HDP’s strict configurations and health device-specific requirements give the impression that it would have a reduced performance in comparison to SPP. In this paper we compare HDP with SPP by analyzing multi-rate data transmission in the context of a cardiovascular monitoring application. In particular, we model the expected number of transmissions and packet loss incurred by the two profiles. Our results show that in contrast to popular belief the transmission energy is similar for both profiles, but HDP offers the advantage of plug-and-play interoperability.