UWB and mmWave Communication Techniques and Systems for Healthcare - Ultra-Wideband and 60 GHz Communications for Biomedical Applications - page 5

facilitate information access and organization; they subsequently evolved providing
mobile access to those data and connectivity towards patients and other medical staff
inside the facility. Then, innovative solutions to improve the workflow have been de-
veloped. They involve not only human actors but also the equipment, tagged through
electronic devices (e.g. radio frequency identification (RFID) originally used for lo-
calization purposes) or able to transmit collected data directly to the medical personal
device, like high-resolution images (e.g. computerized axial tomography (CAT) scan,
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)) or videos from implantable devices (e.g. a cap-
sule endoscope with VGA image capabilities). In this way, the system contributes
to two main issues: (1) to improve efficiency and productivity of care professionals
through increasing data access, and (2) to provide additional instruments that can
help reduce the number of medical errors.
Nowadays, hospital-centred systems are evolving in this direction, exploiting cur-
rent technologies like RFID, sensors, mobile devices and wireless communications;
however, a complete and working solution has not been really developed yet. Look-
ing at Fig. 2 , we can identify three different subsystems which are strictly connected
by multiple information flows: (1) the central subsystem is represented by the per-
sonal medical device (generally integrating an RFID reader with the capabilities of
a smartphone or a tablet PC), (2) the hospital subsystem identified by the set of
wireless devices distributed in the environment (both related to instruments and pa-
tient's identifications and the wireless communication infrastructure) and (3) HIS
as point of collection, storage and management of health data. The communication
flows involve personal medical device in order to communicate with the hospital
subsystem and its components, with HIS to access stored data and with the personal
devices of other colleagues to exchange data and optimize communications. Thus,
the personal medical device must be able to manage different wireless technologies
and communication protocols. For further details about the two architectures, we
refer the interested reader to the comprehensive survey provided in [1].
UWB Communications for Healthcare
Medical and healthcare solutions can benefit from the low-power spectral density
proper of UWB signals. Radiated signal power is low enough to be safe for human
tissues, still providing reasonable communication range and data rate. Hence, the
UWB becomes by far the best candidate for on-body communications, WBAN stan-
dards and also suitable for endoscopic devices [ 9 ]. Furthermore, the extremely wide
bandwidth of UWB signals provides very accurate positioning capability, which
represents a very desirable feature in both endoscopic diagnosis (patient-centric
application) and organizational use, e.g. the hospital-centric applications.