Wireless technology to monitor remote patients-a survey

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) is a technology to enable monitoring of patients outside of conventional clinical settings (e.g. in the home), which may increase access to care and decrease healthcare delivery costs. There is a lack of timely access to necessary healthcare in remote areas, especially in India. While RPM technology can be used for disease management, it also reduces the risk of hospital readmissions. The use of cable-free communications between distributed and small sensor devices in healthcare application offers many advantages to monitor people and their surrounding physical environment. In this paper we present a comparative analysis of wireless technologies for healthcare monitoring in heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) context. The study presents analysis on how to choose the suited technology taking into account the application requirements. The choice depends on some criteria like delay and quality of service requirements. This paper gives advantages and drawbacks and compares standardized and proprietary wireless technologies.