Wireless patient monitoring: reliability and power management

Wireless and mobile technologies are finding a role in patient monitoring in diverse environments including hospitals and nursing homes. However, the quality and reliability of patient monitoring have not been highly satisfactory due to unpredictable and spotty coverage of infrastructure-oriented wireless networks such as wide-area cellular networks and wireless LANs. Recently, the use of ad hoc wireless networks among mobile and wearable devices for patient monitoring has been proposed. Although very exciting, there are many challenges in using ad hoc wireless networks for patient monitoring including how to support reliable patient monitoring and how to manage power transmission from patients' devices. In this paper, we provide several solutions for enhancing the reliability of patient monitoring and for improving the power management of devices in normal and emergency messages transmission. We are currently evaluating the performance of the proposed solutions and protocols, and the results will be presented at the workshop.