Sensors and Wireless Communication for Medical Care

Biological, chemical, and radiological agents can tamper with the activities of medical care providers, patient samples, and medicine administration. This results in a shut down of all medical care, leaving patients at a major risk. The technical challenge is to develop sensors to detect and monitor any violations in the medical care environment before threat to life occurs. Wireless devices must communicate multimedia data such as patient information, laboratory results, prescriptions, and X-ray and EKG reports. The reliability, security, and accuracy of these sensors and wireless devices can affect the timeliness access to information for patient monitoring. In addition, data can be corrupted, computer information systems can fail, and communication networks may experience denial of service attacks leading to complete failure of proper patient care. In this paper, we discuss security and safety issues in medical environment, the technology, types, and characteristics of sensors, and research issues in smart antennas, denial of service, fault tolerant authentication, privacy issues, and energy considerations. A discussion of sensors in patient rooms, clinics/wards, hospitals, and measurements of safety and security is presented. The available devices for sensor and wireless communication are also briefly included. I.SECURITY AND SAFETY Medical care environments can be vulnerable to malicious behavior and hostile settings. In Ad Hoc hospital setups for military operations, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks; wireless communication is needed in an antagonistic environment that consists of jungles, deserts, mountains, and lack of any fixed infrastructure. Everything is on the move including mobile units, base stations, and users. The nodes in such a distributed control environment may be malicious, selfish, malfunctioning, and compromised. Authentication, key management, integrity of data communication, adaptability to type/timing/duration/extension of failures are major technical challenges. In established hospitals with fixed infrastructures, the prospect of a terrorist attack on the water supply, electric grid, food supply, and the environment  A. Bhargava and M. Zoltowski are with the ECE department, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907 USA. (e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]). can cause havoc. Biological, chemical, and radiological agents can tamper with the activities of medical care providers, patient samples, and medicine administration can result in a shut down of all medical care leaving patients at major risk. The technical challenge is to develop sensors to detect and monitor any violations in the medical care environment before threat to life occurs. Wireless devices must communicate multimedia data such as patient information, laboratory results, prescriptions, X-ray and EKG reports. The reliability, security, and accuracy of these sensors and wireless devices can affect the timeliness access to information for patient monitoring. In addition, data can be corrupted, computer information systems can fail, and communication networks may experience denial of service attacks leading to a complete failure of proper patient care. During a disaster recovery, the interaction amongst healthcare providers, pharmacies, emergency personal (firemen, police), law enforcement agencies, and government/community leaders must be ensured through a wireless network. Such dynamic collaboration should be secure, private, reliable, correct/consistent, and sometimes anonymous. II.TECHNOLOGY AND TYPES OF SENSORS