Analysis of a Healthcare Platform RF Emission in Indoor Environment

The paper investigates the Radio Frequency (RF) coverage and electromagnetic interference (EMI) effect on the performance of the e-healthcare platform CareStore. The hardware part is constituted by the Common Recognition and Identification Platform (CRIP) which operates with Bluetooth in order to detect and receive data from medical devices. To assess the CRIP board performance against the EMIs, the symbol-error-rate (SER) is evaluated in function of the signal-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) and with various digital data modulation techniques. As expected, the SER increases with the SINR and decreases with the number of bits/symbol. Furthermore, the RF link budgets and the unintentional EMIs were analyzed based on Matlab computations by considering an equivalent transmitter source placed in a multiwall floor environment with dimensions of hundreds square meters. The received signal strength coverage cartographies were established for ideal sources placed at different locations. The proposed method benefits from its simplicity and high computation speed compared to the ray tracing or full wave approaches. Keywords-multiwall indoor environment, wireless device, electromagnetic interference (EMI), RF coverage cartography.