A high-energy-efficiency link scheme for closed-loop medical monitoring and intervention

A high-energy-efficiency wireless communication link scheme is proposed for portable medical applications with strict resource constraints. The scheme is especially optimized for the application systems with the star-topology master-slave network, i.e., the network formed by a portable data-logger (master) and several sensor nodes (slaves). The proposed scheme eliminates “non-effective” operation energy consumption in the power-critical slave nodes, by means of “moving” the energy-hungry operations to the master node. Compared to the conventional protocols, the proposed scheme can greatly save energy and lengthen the lifetime of the slave nodes which are usually supplied by miniature button batteries, with the cost of affordable extra power consumption in the master node. The prototype verification shows that energy efficiency and lifetime can be improved by at least 50% for slave sensor nodes with a typical operation duty cycle.