Wireless Patient Monitoring – The Medical Body Area Network Service

This is pretty outstanding, no wires connected when you are laying in bed as a patient, certainly will make it easier to move around with just sensors attached. Also mentioned is the work with the FCC for a special frequency for wireless patient monitoring, so your blue tooth devices and other unlicensed wireless signals will not interfere.

The Medical Body Area Network Service, or MBANS is the name given by the FCC and it is work in progress but is looking quite favorable thus far. If you end up in the hospital in the future, like it or not, it certainly appears you and your body information will be wireless, and you would still be able to use your cell phone too. One nice feature too is that the monitored information would be available for doctors and nurses throughout the facility, again wirelessly to it appears there is some type of integration at some level to send the information once collected, and I guess we’ll know more as it develops with GE. BD

GE Healthcare is developing a Body Sensor Network (BSN) that consists of sensor devices that collect patient-specific data, from body temperature and pulse-oximetry to blood glucose levels and respiratory function. The real-time information will be transmitted to doctors, nurses, caregivers, etc., to enable far more efficient body monitoring from any location, which in turn provides the most current patient information and treatment option evaluations.

GE's proposal (PDF) requests that the FCC allocate frequencies 2360 to 2400 MHz on a secondary, licensed basis for low-power, short-range, wireless medical devices such as BSNs. "These new frequencies will provide a protected spectrum for wireless medical BSNs and reduce the potential of interference from ubiquitous unlicensed radio devices such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Wi-Fi," according to their press release.