Authors:
Amjad Soomro
and
Ruediger Schmitt
Affiliation:
Philips Research North America, United States
Keyword(s):
IEEE 802.11, IEEE P11073, IEEE P11073.1.1, 11073, 11073.1.1, WLAN, Wi-Fi, Medical use cases.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Biomedical Signal Processing
;
Design and Development Methodologies for Healthcare IT
;
Devices
;
Distributed and Mobile Software Systems
;
Evaluation and Use of Healthcare IT
;
Health Engineering and Technology Applications
;
Health Information Systems
;
Human-Computer Interaction
;
Mobile Technologies
;
Mobile Technologies for Healthcare Applications
;
Neural Rehabilitation
;
Neurotechnology, Electronics and Informatics
;
Physiological Computing Systems
;
Software Engineering
;
Wearable Sensors and Systems
Abstract:
We study in this paper use of IEEE 802.11 wireless technologies for medical devices. The simulated use cases are derived from the ones specified in IEEE P11703.1.1 document. We consider the use cases where a WLAN using IEEE 802.11 is providing connectivity to medical, voice (VoIP) and IT applications simultaneously. This use case is interesting to hospitals because it provides potential cost savings. We model IEEE 802.11e QoS features and we use a wireless channel model with high and stable SNR to observe MAC protocol behavior. Our results indicate that QoS of medical and VoIP devices is met when they operate in dedicated channels, that is, without any IT and in good channel conditions. The inclusion of background IT load, affects QoS of both medical devices and VoIP. We quantify the performance improvement for medical devices when using IEEE 802.11 voice category and compare it with using best-effort category. The power consumption of wireless devices is not considered in this work.