Transforming healthcare and medical telemetry through cognitive radio networks

The Wireless Medical Telemetry Services (WMTS) band has been established by the FCC in the United States for transmission of data related to a patient's health, and similar reserved channels exist for life-critical communications throughout the world. However, transmissions in the WMTS band are severely hampered by interferences from adjacent digital television channels, and due to non-uniform access priority, as this band is also shared by utility telemetry and government installations. In this article, we propose the use of cognitive radio technology to dynamically utilize the WMTS frequencies based on the activity patterns of the high priority users, and the quality of service constraints of the patients' data, while ensuring protection to existing higher priority transmissions and the safe operation of sensitive medical equipment. The priority users here are utility telemetry transmissions in certain portions of the WMTS band, government run radar sites, and legacy medical telemetry equipment without cognitive radio capability. We provide the first measurements on the complete WMTS spectrum activity at two major hospital locations in the Boston area, and outline an optimization framework that assigns frequency and transmission power jointly in this setting. The article also discusses the current state of the art and the major challenges in the implementation of this new cognitive radio assisted medical telemetry paradigm.