A Manchester-OOK Visible Light Communication System for Patient Monitoring in Intensive Care Units

• Main Authors: Klaas Minne Van Der Zwaag, Marianne Pontara Marinho, Wesley Da Silva Costa, Francisco De Assis Souza Dos Santos, Teodiano Freire Bastos-Filho, Helder R. O. Rocha, Marcelo E. V. Segatto, Jair A. L. Silva
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: E-health; intensive care environments; visible light communication; manchester coding
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9494356/
• ISSN: 2169-3536

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is an interesting solution in Intensive Care (IC) medical environments to, among others, prevent the spread of emerging diseases. This work presents the design of a low-cost and stable VLC transceiver system in addition to practical characterizations and experimental performance evaluations for application in IC environments. The application focuses on the transmission of Manchester-based on-off keying signals, in a proof-of-concept apparatus that makes use of the Eye Opening Penalty (EOP) metric to illustrate a comprehensive picture of the potentials of the evaluated VLC system. Parameters such as Light-Emitting Diode (LED) bias current, modulation frequency, line-of-sight link distance, and signal pattern were analyzed here. Experimental results show an outstanding behavior considering an LED bias current of 400 mA, a signal frequency of 1 MHz and a VLC transmission link length of 2.5 m. To validate our system, vital parameters as heart rate, oxygen saturation, pulse rate, respiration rate, temperature and non-intrusive blood pressure signals were transmitted for VLC links of 1.5, 5 and 15 m, which were received by a multi-parameter monitor, with EOP values of 0.89, 0.96 and 2.67 dB, respectively.