Internet of things patient-clinician link reliability for bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi bands

This paper presents empirical and statistical modelling results for body-to-body wireless sensor systems for a bed-bound patient and mobile clinician in futuristic Internet of Things-enabled hospital environments. As wireless link reliability between the “Things” is essential for medical applications we investigate link robustness for typical patient orientations (lying/sitting in bed) and provide data for future medical infrastructures. The Internet of Things (IoT) encompasses many wireless technologies and those currently available will be utilised and accepted first. When averaging results over all three journeys analysis revealed the lying and sitting postures showed similar received power (RSSI) for Bluetooth 5 and both Wi-Fi frequencies (-58.8/-63.8 dBm at 2.4/5.2 GHz respectively) while standard deviation (s.d.) of power was less for lying positions. Also, fading caused by biomechanical movement of the clinician was investigated by removal of distance-dependent path loss components. Averaged over three journeys, lying displayed higher RSSI than sitting for both frequencies (-58.3/-59.3 dBm for lying/sitting at 2.4 GHz, and -63.3/-64.2 dBm for lying/sitting respectively at 5.2 GHz); s.d. of power was less for lying than sitting. This work addresses the lack of useable measurement data for futuristic hospital environments where patients and clinicians form ad-hoc body-to-body biomedical networks.