Networking architectures for healthcare wireless sensor networks comparison of architectures used for remote patient monitoring

During the last decade, the national health systems faced tremendous pressure coming from two main factors: an increased number of patients and the necessity to limit the constant increase of the cost of assistance. The bigger number of patients is explained mainly by a growing number of older population, mainly in the developed countries, which, in turn, represents one factor of the cost rising; the second factor is represented by the requirement to provide quality health services over a continuously increasing area, where there are only few hospitals and medical personnel available. A potential answer to this critical situation can be offered by technology via telehealth. Telehealth, as it is defined by ATA website, “is used to encompass a broader definition of remote healthcare that does not always involve clinical services. Videoconferencing, transmission of still images, e-health including patient portals, remote monitoring of vital signs, continuing medical education and nursing call centers are all considered part of telemedicine and telehealth”, During the last years specialized architectures have been proposed, each one of them including advanced communication technologies on the wireless data link and on the networking level. Each one of these architectures is focused to solve the permanent connection between the patient and the healthcare provider center where all the data is collected an analyzed. Instead of evaluating separately each architecture, we derived two main categories: hospital-oriented and home-oriented architectures, within the large majority of proposals fitting in. This paper evaluates the two categories on different technical and functional requirements to be able to provide an objective method to differentiate between them.