On practical issues about interference in telecare applications based on different wireless technologies

Abstract

Telemedicine systems have been progressively paying more and more attention to wireless technologies for personal area network (PAN). Depending on the features of the system to be developed, different technologies need to be deployed. These technologies are supposed to coexist, even though many of them operate in the same 2.4-GHz band. In case of interference, there are safety mechanisms included in the standard. However, these mechanisms do not work exactly as expected in theory. This paper presents an experiment with a real Bluetoothbased ECG system and Zigbee temperature sensors in an environment where a WiFi network is operating. The main novelty of the paper is the real implementation and experiments of all three wireless technologies for both continuous and discrete medical signals. Conclusions and recommendations for reliable operation are given for all three involved technologies.