Cellular Network Connectivity for Real Time Medical Device Connectivity

I am very firm believer in the use of 3G and 4G capabilities for network connectivity, however there are implications for when you consider any use model that demands a quality of service requirement. Some smoke was blown last week at the MDC conference that a specific frequency (lets say LTE), should be allocated for medical device connectivity. After spending years validating the use of WLAN for real time patient monitoring and other medical devices, you simply have to develop the right design to ensure “quality of service”, as well as security. This is required if you intend to share the enterprise network with other applications, such as data, voice and video. You simply have to demonstrate that alarms, physiological waveforms, and recordings can get through in a reliable and persistent fashion. This is not only important to gain the appropriate regulatory approval, but also for end user deployments. According to a recent study by the researchers from teh University of Michigan and MicroSoft Research, wireless network management can result in slower phone performance, weaker battery life, and even increased security issues for consumers. The study released a smart phone application called NetPiculet to the Android Market which allowed them to study how 400 consumers using 107 global networks were impacted by network management. The data found that network management at many carriers not only degraded application performance and battery life, but left some vulnerable to IP spoofing. One of the first things that researchers discovered was the apparent handicap on network speed imposed by a major U.S. carrier (For legal reasons the team anonymized the data). Suprisingly, packets of data sent across this network are buffered by the carrrier itself. This means that when a packet of data fails to make it to its destination – a common occurence on wireless networks – it cannot be instantly retransmitted as it would normally be on the Internet. Instead, the sending device must wait a long time – on the order of seconds – for a time out to alert it to the failure.
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