VLC-enabled monitoring in a healthcare setting: Overview and Challenges

Visible Light Communication (VLC) has the potential to revolutionize various aspects of the healthcare industry. VLC’s capability to achieve high data rates, reaching several megabits per second, renders it ideal for meeting strict communication requirements and ensuring dependable data transmission within healthcare environments. The Radio Frequency (RF) communication currently used in healthcare settings suffers from interference and high latency. In a VLC-enabled network, the information is transferred by modifying the visible light spectrum, which is used for lighting and ranges from 400 to 700 nm with no electromagnetic interference. The infrastructure to realise VLC communication includes light sources like Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that can improve the energy economy and also facilitate high-data-rate communication. This article aims to provide an in-depth literature survey towards important healthcare applications such as VLC-enabled patient monitoring systems and indoor localization and identifies some of the major challenges and some of the open issues in the field of VLC-enabled healthcare.