Through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Scholar in Residence program, they propose to conduct a study of the characteristics of the wireless communication channel used by commercially available medical devices to transmit data to medical monitoring services. Characterization of the wireless communication links is needed for FDA regulatory review of medical devices integrated with smart phones. The purpose of the project is to establish a testing procedure for evaluating mobile communication required for transport of medical information, using a range of wireless devices from simple 3G cellular phones to leading smart phone platforms. The research is conducted in two phases, the first one in an anechoic chamber where statistical measures of connectivity from a medical device to the phone are performed. In the second phase, a set of test procedures in specific natural environments that incorporate base station communication are generated.
The goal of this project was to evaluate the quality and reliability of a wireless link from an onbody medical device to a remote physician to enable the use of home based critical monitoring systems for out patient care. Our emphasis was on the use of bluetooth as the transmission medium to a smart phone which then sent data to the cellular network. Metrics that were evaluated were packet error rate and latency. We evaluated the coexistance of the on body bluetooth link to a mobile phone in the 2.4 GHz band using techniques recommended by our collaborators at the FDA in the EMC and Wireless laboratory. Additionally, we created a test system for evaluation of the link from the mobile phone to the first layer of the cellular network. Data was collected in an anechoic chamber at FDA to evaluate the bluetooth link and data was collected in Boulder, Colorado for the mobile phone to base station link. Results of our experiments were provided to our collaborators at FDA on the bluetooth link as well as the test configuratino used in Boulder. Information on the test setup and configuration of the devices as well as our test results from CU Boulder can be obtained by contacting Dr. Kimberly E. Newman (newmanke@colorado.edu).
