Enhancing wireless medical telemetry through dynamic spectrum access

Wireless Medical Telemetry Systems (WMTS) currently operate on FCC designated bands for transmitting critical patient health information to distant receivers within hospitals. However, the current devices experience intermittent interference from digital TV transmissions in neighboring channels; are prohibited from transmitting multimedia data; and must operate with a secondary access priority in portions of the WMTS band, also shared with utility metering. We propose a fundamentally new communication paradigm for medical telemetry through dynamic spectrum access technology that adheres to the access rules in the WMTS band, and yet addresses the above concerns. The contributions of the paper are as follows: (i) we undertake a spectrum measurement study at hospital locations in the Boston area to model spectrum usage and activities in the medical band, (ii) we formulate the channel and power allocation task as an optimization problem under constrains of permissible electromagnetic interference to sensitive medical equipment, and latency, bandwidth thresholds of the medical data. Simulation results reveal the potential benefit of the use of dynamic spectrum access to improve medical telemetry and promises long-term improvement in the healthcare domain.