A comparison of UWB WBAN receivers in different measured hospital environments

Wireless technology has been developing fast for years and is spreading to new areas of everyday life. One of the newest areas is healthcare and welfare sector where it can be a significant way to save costs and improve existing procedures. The coming years are going to be challenging as the population, in the developed countries especially, is aging fast and more patients are going to need treatment but with the same or even smaller number of nursing staff than nowadays. Therefore there is a clear need for both improvement of methods and cutting down the costs. In this paper, the performance of different ultra wideband (UWB) receivers implemented following the IEEE 802.15.4a requirements are being compared in different hospital environments. Wireless body area network (WBAN) radio channel models used in the simulations are based on the measurements carried out in a real hospital environment in Oulu, Finland.