Using WiMAX network in a telemonitoring system

Traditionally, medical care uses outpatient or inpatient models to solve patients´ problems. However, the inconvenience of transportation frequently causes delay in health care for home-dwelling patients with chronic diseases, resulting in inequality of medical care. This paper proposes a telemonitoring system based on WiMAX network for monitoring and delivering health care service to home-dwelling chronic hypertension patients, with the idea of improving the accessibility of medical care by utilizing the benefits of Internet to construct a ubiquitous health care environment. The paper compared and analyzed three wireless Networks: WiMAX, WiFi and HSDPA, and found that WiMAX has the best performance regarding to stability as a long-distance health care delivery platform. A questionnaire survey in the hospital also revealed that the medical staff are highly recognized with telemedicine, which supports and serves as a reference for the designing of the telemonitoring system.