Untethered Health - Radio Technologies in a Health Monitoring Context

Abstract:
Within the past decade, wireless technologies have become a crucial part of our day to day life, generally allow-ing us to overcome inconveniences caused by spatial dependencies of services or devices. Especially in the do-main of health monitoring, patient supervision and care for the elderly the possibility to physically decouple health parameter acquisition from data analysis by substituting wires with wireless links has a great impact on the quality of life of patients. This paper targets to supply an overview of available wireless technologies that may be used in a health monitor-ing context. Since this domain includes a rich set of different applications, essential parameters shared by a ma-jority of current or envisioned applications are pinpointed and used as a basis for an evaluation of the decision on the usage of a particular wireless standard.