I have been contacted by a least one major medical device company about my input as well as another consultant that have asked me to blog. The FCC has designated 40 megahertz in the 2.3 GHz frequency band for short-range, wideband transmission within medical facilities and homes. Basically the best of industry and networking practices can and have demonstrated effective and safe use of the current available unlicensed spectrum. Over the past 30 years I have been in and around the the medical telemetry space…before WMTS and past…oh yes all aspects of “wireless”. Please note that attached article that Dr. Baker and myself authored regarding “wireless in healthcare”. (Please see page one and two…WMTS). RF is RF and even though there is dedicated spectrum..unintentional emitters can cause interference. Witness the intense practice by the cellular carriers to monitor their “licensed space” on a vigilant basis. Over the next several days I will author several blogs regarding how the best of practices, the use of standards based wireless spectrum, can lower not only costs…but decrease risk. This move (40 Mhz in 2.3GHz) seems to parallel the intensive meetings via the Baylor incident, the re-allocation of spectrum from VHF and UHF, and request from the FCC for “specific spectrum for WMTS.” This caused pretty much the entire medical telemetry marketplace to move out of the UHF and VHF space to WMTS, which accounted to “millions of $$ of spending by hospitals”. So the question is why not use commercially available ANT, LPBT, GSM, LTE…etc? Is this an attempt to show a value difference in the increasingly commoditized patient monitoring marketplace? This will be explored as mentioned in upcoming blogs next week. These blogs will be centered on the perhaps reasons why medical device companies (not all) are perhaps doing this and some of the technical questions that I certainly would bring up. I invite all comments on this.
Download Wp_Medical-grade_Life-critical_Wireless_Networks_SteveBaker
When the FDA and FCC had their co-conference a few years ago, you saw this dynamic regarding licensing-setting aside spectrum versus use of the shared spectrum in the dialogue between Phillips and Sotera. It’s worth going back to see the archive: on display were different interests with different ‘pull’ at the government-regulatory level. Having worked in the hospital environment when the ‘Baylor’ incident occurred, I can see a ‘preventive’ mindset in this decision. However, you are correct, RF is RF and a ‘leaky’ emitter can cause all kinds of transmission issues – and where you will see this more prevalently is in the lesser controlled environment of the home. Should be interesting to see if this truly provides protection in the end.
It is the two big companies in patient monitoring trying to sway tje marlet