The Case for Medical Grade Wireless Connectivity

In many cases the wireless exchange of patient information (vital signs, data or images) inside hospitals is a mission critical application. However, designing dedicated medical application specific solutions to guarantee fail safe performance in critical situations is usually not an option. The cost effectiveness of a medical specific solution is a major issue to start with, even harder to address is the absence of dedicated spectrum. As an exception to this rule the USA released spectrum in the WMTS band, dedicated for wireless medical telemetry. Though dedicated solutions as the one for telemetry offered in the USA are favored by many hospitals, an increasing number of hospitals (and their CIO\´s) expect shared deployment of generic (non medical specific) networks like the facility WiFi LAN or a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) for both IT and clinically oriented information exchange. This raises the issue of deploying non-medical application specific networks to transfer medical information of varying levels of "mission criticality". What makes a connectivity concept "medical grade" is not unambiguous and depends on the application context but it usually encompasses a number of the following aspects: 1)predictable (real-time) performance 2) dependable, reliable, fault tolerant 3) fast network discovery/association, hot plug & play, auto recovery 4) energy efficient (implying light weight protocols) 5) support of security & privacy requirements 6) shared spectrum coexistence (agility) Realizing medical grade connectivity in the context of existing, mature commodity networking solutions (i.e. WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee) is not trivial. Proprietary mitigation scenarios do help but some of them reach down to the MAC layer (silicon) or require agreements with the wireless network vendor. Hence, to address the ra