Exploring Region of Interest (ROI) to Support Quality of Service in Unreliable Wireless Electronic Healthcare Communications

Abstract

In this paper the authors propose a new Region of Interest (ROI) based approach to improve wireless electronic healthcare service quality. The major contribution of this research is the adaptability of the proposed approach with regards to channel information. In the proposed approach, important bit sequence in healthcare data (e.g., Electrocardiagram - ECG) is identified as interested region and extracted for unequal treatment in error-prone wireless communication channels. Specifically, variable bit-plane coding is applied to ECG samples in ROI and non-ROI. The fine-grained bit-plane coding in ROI provides more information precision of healthcare data, while the coarse-grained bit-plane coding in non-ROI saves more communication channel bandwidth. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing healthcare data errors with communication bandwidth constraint.