In this article, we discuss what wireless technologies can be used for medical applications and how well they perform in a healthcare/hospital environment. We consider the emerging low-rate Wireless Personal Area Network technology as specified in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.15.4 standard and evaluate its suitability to the medical environment. We focus on scalability issues and the need to support tens of communicating devices in a patient's hospital room. We evaluate the effect of packet segmentation and backoff parameter tuning to improve the overall network performance that is measured in terms of packet loss, goodput, and access delay. We also evaluate the performance of 802.15.4 devices under interference conditions caused by other 802.15.4 devices and by wireless local area networks using IEEE 802.11b. Published by Elsevier B.V.
