Time and Bandwidth Efficiency in Transmission of Telemedicine and In-Hospital Patient Dat

Developments in wireless communications have increased the use of medical wireless body area networks in various applications, such as remote patient monitoring and diagnosis. We investigate the problem of cognitive radio adoption in E-health medical systems with body area networks. We propose an overlay cognitive radio scheme for telemedicine and in-hospital patient data transfer. We consider the telemedicine and the in-hospital patient monitor to be the primary and the secondary users, respectively. Using the fact that the data transmitted to the telemedicine terminal and the in-hospital patient monitor both originate from the coordinator of the same medical wireless body area network, the side information at the transmitter can be used to mitigate the interference while the two medical data transmissions applications exist concurrently on the same frequency band. This method can be used to enhance the spectral and time efficiency and bit error rate in transferring medical information collected from body area networks to remote destinations.