Patient monitoring using Visible Light uplink data transmission

Abstract

Patient health monitoring technology presents great potential for future healthcare applications and Radio Frequency (RF) communication is the most popular medium for its implementation. This paper presents a static indoor patient monitoring scheme using uplink Visible Light Communication (VLC) suitable for hospital environments. VLC is considered instead of RF communication because of health concerns regarding continuous RF exposure to patients for health monitoring. The proposed scheme is designed for transmitting uplink patient data using VLC through On-Off Keying (OOK) modulation. Experiments were conducted with several body-sensors data transmitted using predefined headers. The experiment results show that the proposed VLC based patient monitoring scheme can offer accurate monitoring data transmission with minimal interference with the help of space diversity.