Software defined radio (SDR) for healthcare applications: A proposed approach

Abstract

Recently, most of the hospitals are using conventional computer systems and medical equipment to diagnosis the patients. Moreover, healthcare services are mainly depending on the information technology, sometimes such dependency may cause network failure and that may result a loss of life. Therefore, in my contribution a smart architecture based on software defined radio (SDR) is proposed. This paper describes the proposed system in which three hospitals (SDR units), 9 patients are assumed at several distances from the hospital and they will try to communicate with the hospital. This system includes the integration of wireless communication concepts, wireless sensor networks, cloud technology and wireless medical devices on single common platform for seamless interoperability and reconfigurability. The proposed system is tested experimentally by using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) N210 as hardware platform and GNU Radio as software. This paper presented experimental results in terms of channel noise, signal to noise ratio (SNR), bit error rate (BER) and throughput. This paper concludes that the SDR is an emerging technology in healthcare applications with 24hr/365day business.