Performance Assessment of Wireless ECG Transmission over IEEE 802.11 WLANs

We explore the use of IEEE 802.11 wireless technology to support health monitoring application, by providing ubiquitous connectivity while allowing patients greater mobility. The acquisition of electrocardiogram (ECG) is used as an example to highlight the engineering choices, such as packetization and access control rules, that must be made in designing a wireless transport. The error-prone nature of wireless channels, together with the unpredictable delay and jitter caused by the non-deterministic nature of access to the wireless medium, need to be considered. We discuss how our design choice with respect to each issue affects the performance of the network in a high-quality ECG monitoring service with bounded delay. We evaluate our schemes using simulations with non-compressed 2-lead ECG data from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database.