A Study on the Seamless Monitoring over the Wireless LAN and the Public Cellular Network for a Portable Patient Monitoring System

As information technologies are developing, the improvement of the quality of life becomes worldwide issues. Especially, to improve the quality of life of a patient suffering intermittent diseases, in addition to the some portable equipments for measuring, analyzing, and notifying the status of the patients, methods of communication for seamless transmission of the measured data over to the remote site, such as an emergency center or a hospital, are required. In this paper, we address a seamless transmission of patient monitoring data such as ECG from a moving patient to a remote site, wherever the patient may be. We divide the whole environments into two wireless communication environments: an indoor one based on WLAN and an outdoor one based on CDMA cellular network in which the patient is assumed to move anywhere. We develop algorithms, implement them on a PDA-based hardware platform, and show some of the results for handover between the two environments in addition to the data transmission for each of the two environments.