Wireless communication solution for health care equipment

Abstract

Wireless communications offer robustness, high transfer rate, low implementation cost and therefore they became widespread in all areas. In everyday life many applications, systems or equipments are unthinkable to use communications through wires, as is the case of garage door openers, radio or GPS. In the case of mobile phones there even are a variety of wireless communication types just in one single device, such as 2G/3G, WLAN, Bluetooth and GPS. This work describes the selected solution, its implementation and circuitry tuning for a reliable and optimized wireless communication between a portable device - Adipsmeter - and a software application - LipoSoft-, together components of an integrated system - LipoTool - conceived for evaluating body composition. The solution is based on the use of Microchip Technology Inc. components for both processing and wireless communication. For the communication data processing 8-bit microcontrollers were used. The wireless communication antennas use the communication protocol MiWi, based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). The low cost solution designed has proved to be robust, to provide data processing efficiency and to minimize data loss and these features are instrumental to enable LipoTool to conduct innovative studies based in dynamic tissue response evaluation. (c) 2012 IFSA.