Internet of Things-enabled Hospital Wards – Ultra Wideband Doctor-Patient Radio Channels

As Ultra Wideband technology re-emerges as a high-data rate solution for the Internet of Things, we consider the application of the technology to medical environments. We present supporting empirical and statistical modelling investigations into body-to-body Ultra wideband Internet of Things links for a bed-bound patient and a roaming clinician conducting routine medical rounds. Of interest is the statistical parameters that indicate link reliability as well as inter-symbol interference probability for a patient in two most likely postures combined with two likely locations of radio antenna for the roaming clinician (antennas in a handheld tablet and on the clinician’s waist) to create deployment data for futuristic Internet of Things-enabled hospital environments. The RSSI, mean excess delay and the RMS delay spread results indicate that the use of UWB as an enabling IoT technology in such environments would be generally robust for patients in varying postures, as well as nodes positioned either on the clinician or realized in handheld formats. The spread of received power is best mathematically modelled by the Lognormal distribution for each combination of patient position and clinician antenna location. Both the tmean and the tRMS for each combination can be generally best modelled by the Weibull distribution.