Indoor optical wireless system dedicated to healthcare application in a hospital

In this study, the authors deal with a wireless healthcare monitoring solution based on a secure technology in hospital context. Actually, radio frequency (RF) networks can present electromagnetic disturbances in hospital environments. The authors thus investigate an alternative solution based on infrared (IR) technology. As patient mobility is inevitable, they focus on mobile IR communications considering line-of-sight (LOS) propagation between the transmitter coupled with medical sensors and the receiver. The authors study different mobility scenarios, one in two dimensions (2D) for a fixed transmitter height and another in three dimensions (3D) by considering transmitter height variations. In each case, they analyse the distributions of channel gain state to find the statistical model of the mobile IR channel for a given distribution of the patient locations within the room (uniform or gaussian). By calculating the outage probability from statistical analysis, they investigate the impact of the mobility on data rates and quality of service needed for this application in the case of an on-off keying (OOK) modulation before concluding on the reliability of the studied mobile healthcare monitoring system.