Challenges and Future Trends in Tele-Health services - ECG Acquisition and Automated Remote Processing - page 125

access (or examine) the patient directly. Information and communication tech-
nology plays a significant role in implementing a reliable platform for medical data
collection, transmission, and presentation to the physician for remote diagnosis. In
many developing countries, since the healthcare sector is primarily government
funded, the development of low-cost indigenous technologies can assume vital
role. Among the social and cultural challenges, lack of training and mindset toward
using computer-based gadgets by the medical community (specially paramedics) is
the main hindrance. Awareness build-up among the prime beneficiaries, i.e.,
patients is also important toward use of new technologies, since a section of people
exert disbelief toward new services and technology. Adoption of proper support and
legal framework for the usage of electronic equipment, their standards, promotion
of e-health in medical education [ 5 ], patient data security and usage in research are
some of the key issues in the national level health policymaking that can support
and expand tele-health services as a whole.
6.3 Zigbee Technology: Use in Healthcare Communication
Networks
Zigbee protocol (IEEE 802.15.4) is intended for low power and short to medium
distance (within 500 m) communication, with multiple nodes per network. The
name comes from Zigzag path of a bee (data packet) between one flower to flower
(nodes). Out of the 7-standard open system interface (OSI) communication layers,
Zigbee specifies only four layers, viz., Physical (PHY), Data Link (DL), Network
(NL) and Application (APL). This helps the system developers to exploit the lower
layers to custom their design. Figure 6.1 shows the Zigbee stack. The salient
features of Zigbee technology is given in Table 6.1 . The IEEE 802.15.4 standard
supports multiple layer topologies, including star and peer-to-peer networks, as
shown in Fig. 6.2 . A Zigbee network uses three devices, viz., network coordinator,
full function device and reduced function device. The network coordinator, only
one in each network, maintains the overall network knowledge and forms the
bridge to other networks. The full function device, also named 'router,' supports
all the IEEE 802.15.4 network functions and features specified by the network. It
can also function as network coordinator. The reduced function device uses the
limited functionality of the Zigbee stack. Detailed information on Zigbee com-
munication can be found in [ 6 - 8 ].
For short-range communication applications in healthcare, viz., patient moni-
toring, Zigbee technology has already been applied in many countries. In [ 9 ], a
Zigbee-based outdoor wireless healthcare monitoring system architecture is
described. The entire system is divided into two parts: Zigbee-based sensor net-
work platform and host server. The patients are provided with Zigbee-enabled
wearable devices which transmit ECG, heart rate, SpO 2 , blood pressure (BP),
temperature and patient position message to the gateway, which in turn, com-
municates to the host servers via Ethernet, Wi-Fi or GPRS. In the reported work,