Bluetooth's ubiquity is both a blessing and a curse. A wireless system might work well using this wireless protocol in some situations if no one else is around but may be less reliable "if someone is sitting next to you with their Bluetooth headset on," says Mike Dempsey, a senior research and development engineer at the Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT), a consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and engineering schools. "This is the reason that the medical industry needs to advocate for dedicated spectrum."
Body Sensor Network Bandwidth
Healthcare providers and technology companies are pushing the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allocate a dedicated piece of the wireless spectrum for secure, reliable transmission of patient data. The FCC is taking this request to heart and in August began soliciting comments from the public that will help the agency determine which portion of the spectrum, if any, is needed to protect MBANs from potential interference from unlicensed mobile devices or other interference. The comment period is expected to last 90 days, after which the FCC could make a decision.
"We're working to get some spectrum set aside to help us advance low power wireless sensors that could go on the body and replace wired sensors today," Freeman says, adding he is hopeful the allocation could happen by the end of the year.
The FCC has allocated spectrum for medical devices in the past. In 2000, the agency cleared space for the Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WMTS) that allows potentially "life-critical" equipment such as heart, blood pressure and respiration monitors to wirelessly transmit patient measurement data to a nearby receiver on an interference-protected basis. Prior to this, medical telemetry devices had been operating unprotected from interference either on vacant TV channels or on special channels reserved for low-power operation.
Since the WMTS does not have a lot of bandwidth, this piece of spectrum is reserved for only the most important signals (such as heart rate and breathing) data. This excludes sensors collecting and monitoring less critical, though still key, data, such as blood glucose levels, body temperature or pulse oximetry (the oxygenation of a patient's hemoglobin), from the WMTS.
MBANs at Home
If all goes well, look for MBANs to fall into three categories in the near future—those used to monitor a patient's general health or "wellness," those measuring the health of the elderly, and those used to monitor patients with long-term medical conditions such as Parkinson's disease or epilepsy, says Paolo Bonato, director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Boston's Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School.. He also served as chair of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) Technical Committee on Wearable Biomedical Sensors and Systems in 2008.
Bonato is watching the MBAN space with special interest, since his work focuses on technology in rehabilitation for disabled people, in particular on wearable technology and robotics. As MBAN technology matures, it might also be used to address the needs of the world's aging population and problems with healthcare costs by allowing patients to be monitored remotely (yet unobtrusively) while at home. "Some conditions could be monitored in the field," he says. "We can't put everyone in medical facilities."
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4 Comments
Add CommentThis can't possibly be advanced until we reach a serious understanding of the effects of electromagnetism in and around the body. We still can't be sure what the effects of cell phones are. We are just starting to understand the workings of underlying electric properties of cells and DNA. Because MBAN promises the sales of products that have margin and mass quantity, this will be hard to hold back once product development processes get underway.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe device should be adapted to monitoring a person's exercise routine, such as a GPS system. It could record the person's exercise and transmit the results to a computer to be transferred to a central location. Then two classes of medical insurance could be adopted, one for those who exercise (with all costs paid by taxes) and the other for those who don't, with the second group paying the excess costs. People who can't exercise would be included in the first group. Medical costs could be reduced no less than 40% over the $2.4 trillion currently expended.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is truly an amazing use of technology. The concern over the exposure brought up via one of the comments above, I suspect is less of a concern in relation to the value created by the system itself. We are currently exposed to a variety of radio wave technologies within our homes and as pointed out via our use of cell phones. This should be considered, but the fact a sensor can alert doctors and emergency personnel that a problem exists before it becomes life threatening will not only save lives, but it can also greatly cut down on medical expense as a preventative measure. These are the solutions needed to truly allow healthcare to be universal and to create a better quality of life. Early detection and preventative medicine is a critical requirement that this system can enable. Thanks for the article and I hope to see more articles as this program progresses forward.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith all due respect to my collegues at MGH I do not see the value in yet another failed allocation of precious RF spectrum for medical devices. WMTS was suppose to be an open spectrum that allowed medical devices to "share" the spectrum in a way similar to how ISM devices share the same rf space. The result is a failure. Hospitals must now commit to a single vendor for their medical telemetry systems at enormouse infrastructure cost that essentially locks out innovators. And guess who has been a major benefactor? Not the hospitals or the patients, but the vendors. ISM (aka WiFi) has proved to be just as effective, if not more reliable, and certainly lower price than WMTS. The considerable value of adopting international standards for wireless communications is just that...international. Which means lower costs by leveraging much larger industrial production scales and a worldwide market. An international group proved short range ISM based MPAN radios could reliably connect using off the shelf low powered radios (802.15.4, Zigbee) in the exact architecture suggested in your article. The barrier to making such devices commercially available is not the availability of protected RF spectrum but the lack of insurance reimbursement. Let innovators create affordable, internationally workable solutions on already available and adequate RF spectrum. I hope the FCC is wiser this time around
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisjimw