%0 Journal Article
%T An Algorithm That Predicts CSI to Allocate Bandwidth for Healthcare Monitoring in Hospital's Waiting Rooms
%A Di Lin
%A Fabrice Labeau
%J International Journal of Telemedicine and Applications
%D 2012
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2012/843527
%X In wireless healthcare monitoring systems, bandwidth allocation is an efficient solution to the problem of scarce wireless bandwidth for the monitoring of patients. However, when the central unit cannot access the exact channel state information (CSI), the efficiency of bandwidth allocation decreases, and the system performance also decreases. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to reduce the negative effects of imperfect CSI on system performance. In this algorithm, the central unit can predict the current CSI by previous CSI when the current CSI is not available. We analyze the reliability of the proposed algorithm by deducing the standard error of estimated CSI with this algorithm. In addition, we analyze the efficiency of the proposed algorithm by discussing the system performance with this algorithm. 1. Introduction The increasing number of cases on waiting room death, which refers to the death of patients while staying in a hospital¡¯s waiting room to be given a medical examination, underscores the significance of improving healthcare quality [1]. Most of these cases occur when patients are left alone in waiting rooms, such as when healthcare staff are taking a break or being busy performing other clinical and non-clinical functions. As a potential way of improving healthcare quality, a wireless healthcare monitoring system (illustrated in Figure 1 and detailed later) could help healthcare staff monitor the condition of patients by automatically collecting patient¡¯s data, making some initial decisions on patient condition, and transmitting these decisions and medical data to a doctor¡¯s office via wireless local area network (WLAN). Once emergent condition of a particular patient occurs, healthcare staff would be alerted. Figure 1: Architecture of our healthcare monitoring system. From a network design perspective, a wireless healthcare monitoring system should be capable of supporting the number of patients that will be using the system; being able to assess the network¡¯s capability to serve a given number of patients is a critical factor in promoting adoption of such systems. Therefore, the network patient capacity, which we define as the number of patients that one WLAN deployment can support, is a critical design criterion and performance metric for wireless healthcare monitoring systems. From a practical standpoint, if the hospital¡¯s patient capacity exceeds the network patient capacity, then another WLAN will need to be deployed in parallel within the hospital. Beyond the cost of deploying several networks in parallel, their co-existence
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijta/2012/843527/