Telemedicine health service using LTE-Advanced relay antenna

Abstract As the elderly population has rapidly increased in recent years, people aged 60 and older now constitute 20–30 % of the population in developed countries. Due to reduced overall mental and physical functionality, people have developed various chronic degenerative diseases related to the circulatory and musculoskeletal systems. An aging society leads to longer life spans as well as the need to develop special residential facilities for disease treatment and support of the elderly population. In this ubiquitous age, people can obtain information regardless of place or time and therefore receive telemedicine health services anywhere and anytime. This situation requires embedded system technology for portable telemedicine devices, computer network technology for remote examination, information security technology to manage individual medical data, database technology to process and store a large quantity of medical information, expert system technology to help doctors make sound judgments, software design and test technology to create easy-to-use software, image processing technology to make accurate diagnoses based on image information, multi-searching technology to analyze complex data from various medical institutions, staff, and service providers, and context-aware technology based on wireless sensors that can be used to understand the status of users requesting a specific telemedicine health service. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed the telemedicine health service using an LTE-A-based relay antenna. The antenna proposed in this paper is a planar monopole antenna in which a feed line and a radiation patch are connected in front of a substrate and a plane ground exists opposite to a dielectric in telemedicine. Since a planar monopole antenna requires a length of lambda/4 to generate resonance, it has a demerit in size. The proposed antenna was assigned a current value close to 0 at the central part of the square loop emitter in order to supplement this demerit, and the physical length of the antenna was minimized by folding it inside the square loop center to a frequency of 900 MHz, which is the frequency of domestic SK’s LTE band. In addition, coupling combination was applied at the center of the tip of the T-shape patch and the square loop line folded inside to generate a resonance of 2.4 GHz, which is the high-frequency band of the domestic LTE band. To maximize relay efficiency, relay power allocation and relay routing method were carried out. Selective transmission method was applied to improve reception of the LTE system.