A comparative analysis of BLE and 6LoWPAN for U-HealthCare applications

For decades, there exist a variety of low-power wireless technologies deployed for healthcare applications such as Zigbee/IEEE802.15.4, Bluetooth, ANT, NFC, IrDA. However, the recently announced Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology claims to offer many new compelling features and is expected to get wide adoption by many mobile manufacturers around the world and hence be included in daily life mobile devices. Therefore, it is important to provide future adopters with a thorough yet insightful evaluation of this technology as contrasted to competing ones in the market today. In this paper, we present such evaluation from an experimental point of view as well as referring to technical specifications from manufacturers. The discussion is geared toward assessing the extent to which theses technologies can meet the stringent requirements for u-healthcare applicability. BLE and 6LoWPAN showed greater potentials for such applicability in terms of power demand, bit rate and latency. Nevertheless, BLE was found to be most robust to obstacles and was operable using single coin cell.