An FCC ruling announced on May 24 established a vendor-neutral, dedicated wireless spectrum for medical body area networks (MBANs), which could revolutionize the way patients are monitored and help eliminate the physical wires that tether patients to hospital beds. MBANs are small, wearable sensors that can collect real-time clinical information, such as temperature and respiratory function, and aggregate it at a nearby device for local processing and forwarding to centralized displays and electronic medical records. The advance could help patients be more mobile, which may contribute to improved patient outcomes and recovery, and enhance their overall comfort.
GE Healthcare and Philips Healthcare identified and advocated for MBANs to share a piece of the spectrum traditionally used by the aerospace industry and government agencies for flight testing. According to GE, the medical and aerospace industry submitted a joint proposal in 2011 to the FCC detailing how MBAN devices could reliably share wireless spectrum with safety-related aeronautical telemetry operations. With this ruling, the FCC has allocated 40 MHz of spectrum – 2360 to 2400 MHz – for use by MBAN devices on a shared, secondary basis. This provides a spectrum band for short-range medical technologies to facilitate reliable low-power operation.
In a separate ruling issued the same day, the FCC increased the flexibility for Sprint Nextel to deploy advanced wireless services in portions of the 800-MHz band, which should enable the provider to roll out its CDMA2000 and LTE low-band, broadband wireless services to more users and provide better indoor coverage.
