Implementation Issues for Wireless Medical Devices

Recent technological advances in sensors, low-power integrated circuits, and wireless communications ha ve enabled the design of low-cost, miniature, lightwei ght, and intelligent physiological sensor nodes. Being capab le of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs, these nodes can be seamlessly integrated int o w reless personal or body area networks (WPANs or WBANs, respectively) for health monitoring. These networks promise to revolutionize health care by allowing inexpensiv e, noninvasive, continuous, ambulatory health monitoring with almost real-time updates of medical records via the Int rnet. Though a number of ongoing research efforts are foc using on various technical, economic, and social issues, man y technical hurdles still need to be resolved in order to have flexible, reliable, secure, and power-efficient WBANs suitabl e for medical applications. This paper discusses implemen tatio issues and describes the authors’ prototype sensor network for health monitoring that utilizes off-the-shelf 802.1 5.4 compliant network nodes. The paper presents perform ance analysis for different health care equipment for 6L oWPAN based wireless network .