Picture what’s going to happen in (near) the future hospital: On the road a patient is transferred to the surgery room, all kinds of monitors on patient’s body are sending results to doctors on the other side of the building. While a nurse is stepping to a patient’s bed, the cart that she uses to carry the medication is verifying the patient’s ID with the medicine. And much more. This is the concept of a totally wireless hospital.
The technical challenges for such a hospital, among many others, are to support many different types of wireless monitors and other devices, and to maintain a safe and 0-latency communication among the devices and with the hospital data system.
Oulu University of Finland is on the lead of building up such a wireless hospital. Overall program will be split into three phases. The first is to select promising technologies. The second: laboratory tests of these technologies. The third: transfer those to a live hospital environment.
In addition to the technology challenges, the plan still faces frequency regulation issues, radiation safety issues, and the issue of whether the next-generation technology will be well accepted by people using current technologies. More details can be found here.
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