Design and implementation of a wireless intelligent personal sensor node for the dosimetry of interventional radiology operators

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) featuring portable devices are widely used for healthcare applications such as real time patient monitoring. For such applications, design constraints are set on the amount of energy, limited network capacity (short communication range and low bandwidth), processing and memory resources in each node. In the framework of the Real time Active PIxel Dosimetry (RAPID) project, the attention has been focused on dose monitoring of Interventional Radiology operators. In this paper, we describe the design of a dedicated WSN for real time monitoring, operating in the ISM band, that shows that it is possible to achieve data delivery over wireless networks deployed in clinical environments. The Packet Error Rate of the network has been evaluated in different scenarios: the maximum obtained result was lower than 0.4%, which is acceptable for the specific application. The prototype has also been compared during medical procedures with a reference system, and a correlation in time between them has been found.