Bluetooth 2.1 based Emergency Data Delivery System in HealthNet

Abstract

The interests in health care have considerably increased these days as the aging population becomes larger. Health care has grown to the one of most active research areas especially in the area of wireless, mobile health monitoring systems. The wireless network technologies have advanced to the point where they can enable and help deploy a very broad gamut of systems suitable for medical applications. Several researches have proposed to replace the wired connections among medical devices with wireless connections. Wireless network technologies interwork with sensor equipped BodyLANs. Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are well positioned to support health care applications in limited geographic areas. In particular, the characteristics of Bluetooth and its popularity make it the preferred network infrastructure for HealthNet environments. However, Bluetooth has the "bad reputation" of long connection delays, which may be disastrous in some health applications. In this paper we address the connection delay and propose a new data transfer protocol based on Bluetooth version 2.1. The 2.1 version was published very recently and offers new features that are interest to our application. Among the new features we leverage extended inquiry response (EIR) and secure simple pairing (SSP) to solve the delay problem. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed system significantly improves data delivery as well as power consumption. It solves a well known problem in Bluetooth based wireless networks. Using our proposed scheme, Bluetooth devices are now adequate to support sophisticated scenarios such as emergencies and urgent data dissemination requirements.