Infrared communication technology applied to indoor mobile healthcare monitoring system

Abstract : In the context of healthcare monitoring, it is necessary to transmit vital information from the patient to an interface managed by the hospital staff. In this work we consider a system in which a patient can move within a hospital room and the data collected by sensors are transmitted to a distant receiver placed on the ceiling. We investigate the potentiality of using infrared communications for the transmission of information in this mobile context, by considering the simplest modulation scheme based on On-Off Keying (OOK) technique. In order to represent patient mobility in the room, we use a model for the patient location based on a Gaussian distribution over the three axes of mobility in the room. In addition, we consider different scenarios, considering either a Line Of Sight (LOS) configuration or a diffuse one. From the obtained results, we can determine by evaluating the transmission probability of outage, the potentiality of this technology to ensure the communication between sensors and the collecting point.