Energy efficient wireless data transmission for personal health devices

Abstract

The family of ISO/IEEE11073 standards is the basis of the e-health system and provides interoperability for personal health devices. In the early stage of e-health business, it was expected that people would use a health device individually. In this case, a measurement datum was episodically acquired and generally transmitted for one person at a time. Recently, a health device is expected to be used by multiple people, and large amounts of measurement data are gathered in a short time interval. In addition, mobile health devices have become more popular, so that energy efficient measurement data transmission is required, to prolong the use of a device. In IEEE11073 PHD standards, data transmission is classified into three different types: immediate individual transfer, small block transfer, and large block transfer. The large block transfer using PM-store concept provides efficient transmission. However, an existing PM-store has problem when a device is used by multiple people. To address the defined problem, a modified PM-segment that is in compliance with 11073 standards is proposed in this paper. In particular, the proposed PM-segment is designed to minimize the additional complexity of an agent instead of a manager and it is interoperable with the existing manager. The proposed PM-segment shows better performance than the existing PM-segment, in terms of memory requirements and expected queue time. Also, performance comparison among the three transfers is performed in regard to the delay time and communication power consumption points of view.