On the Capability of Smartphones to Perform as Communication Gateways in Medical Wireless Personal Area Networks

Abstract

This paper evaluates and characterizes the technical performance of medicalwireless personal area networks (WPANs) that are based on smartphones. For this purpose,a prototype of a health telemonitoring system is presented. The prototype incorporates acommercial Android smartphone, which acts as a relay point, or “gateway”, between a setof wireless medical sensors and a data server. Additionally, the paper investigates if theconventional capabilities of current commercial smartphones can be affected by their useas gateways or “Holters” in health monitoring applications. Specifically, the profiling hasfocused on the CPU and power consumption of the mobile devices. These metrics havebeen measured under several test conditions modifying the smartphone model, the type ofsensors connected to the WPAN, the employed Bluetooth profile (SPP (serial port profile) orHDP (health device profile)), the use of other peripherals, such as a GPS receiver, the impactof the use of theWi-Fi interface or the employed method to encode and forward the data thatare collected from the sensors.

Keywords

• wireless personal area networks
• Bluetooth
• SPP
• HDP
• smartphone
• Android
• performance evaluation