Coexistence of Wireless Systems for Remote Monitoring of Vital Functions in the Unlicensed ISM Band

A recent trend in medical practice is the use of wearable wireless body sensors (WBS) to improve mobility of patients and medical personnel during surgery and other procedures, accelerate patients’ recovery, and facilitate remote monitoring of patients suffering from chronic diseases. Currently, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are being introduced in already crowded unlicensed frequency bands, such as the ISM band. This essentially leads to high interference with other electronic devices, low signal-to-noise ratio and links with high bit-error rate. This paper discusses the requirements, benefits and issues related to a WBS in a medical WBAN system for remote health monitoring, operating in the shared ISM frequency band. We investigate the applicability of the concepts of cognitive communications in such environment to enhance the coexistence, robustness, scalability, and utility of medical WBAN systems in heterogeneous wireless networks environment.