Optical wireless connected objects for healthcare

In this Letter the authors explore the communication capabilities of optical wireless technology for a wearable device dedicated to healthcare application. In an indoor environment sensible to electromagnetic perturbations such as a hospital, the use of optical wireless links can permit reducing the amount of radio frequencies in the patient environment. Moreover, this technology presents the advantage to be secure, low-cost and easy to deploy. On the basis of commercially available components, a custom-made wearable device is presented, which allows optical wireless transmission of accelerometer data in the context of physical activity supervision of post-stroke patients in hospital. Considering patient mobility, the experimental performance is established in terms of packet loss as a function of the number of receivers fixed to the ceiling. The results permit to conclude that optical wireless links can be used to perform such mobile remote monitoring applications. Moreover, based on the measurements obtained with one receiver, it is possible to theoretically determine the performance according to the number of receivers to be deployed.