A receiver diversity technique for ensuring high reliability of wireless vital data gathering in hospital rooms

Sensing and wireless technologies have made remarkable advance recently, so wireless vital sensors for medical use, which are light-weight but accurate, have been commercially available. However, because of the low reliability of the wireless data transmission, sensed vital data are often lost in the wireless channel and this is a fatal drawback of the devices for continuous monitoring of patients in hospitals. This paper investigates the effect of using multiple receivers (receiver diversity technique) on the improvement of data loss rate for wireless vital data gathering. Experiments with a wireless vital sensor in hospital rooms reveal that putting receivers to higher positions such as ceiling is advantageous and the use of three receivers can sufficiently improve the data loss rate as compared with the use of a single receiver.