Coexistence of wireless technologies in medical scenarios

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the coexistence nature of wireless technologies most likely to be found in medical scenarios' environment. The diversity and number of these technologies is increasing constantly leading to potential interference problems and performance degradation of wireless medical applications which are expected to become popular in 5G systems. The industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) bands in the 2.4 GHz are already very crowded to the point that the location and use of medical devices have to take into account the pervasive presence of other wireless devices operating in that region of the spectrum. A temporary solution is to use more the 5 GHz bands currently not so heavily utilized. This scenario will change in the near future as unlicensed long-term evolution (LTE) solutions such as MulteFire start operating in those bands. This paper provides a summary of the wireless technologies and devices present in hospitals and other medical care scenarios. It also provides recommendations for the rational share of the spectrum in those scenarios.