Wireless-local-area-network deployment issues in hospitals: Capacity, coverage & electromagnetic compatibility

Healthcare is an important industry that touches most, if not all, of us. The wireless communication revolution can potentially provide medical staff with rapid, bedside access to medical information. Rapid access not only improves healthcare delivery, but can also reduce medical errors, which have been estimated to cause up to 100,000 patient deaths each year in US hospitals alone [1]. Given the potential benefits of using wireless informatics in hospitals, some hospitals are currently using wireless local area network (WLAN) informatics systems, and many hospitals would like to. The potentially-enormous benefit of WLAN informatics comes with the concern that electromagnetic interference (EMI) from radio-frequency (RF) sources might cause critical-care medical equipment to malfunction. There have been many previous reports of medical device malfunction due to EMI [2,3]. Many EMI sources were described, including, although relatively rarely [2], wireless LANs.