MedTech: Improving connectivity challenges in hospitals with narrowband technology

Hospital staff increasingly face connectivity challenges when they attempt to send out patient data to external MedTech companies.

This arises as a result of thick concrete infrastructure, congested networks and an amalgamation of complex inter-connected medical devices such as MRI machines and technology networks such as 5G, WiFi and Bluetooth.

A possible solution? Long Range Wide-Area Networks (LoRaWAN). LoRaWAN is a media access control protocol for wide area networks. More simply, it is a low power wide area network which allows for low-powered devices to communicate with internet-connected applications over long range wireless connections. It provides energy efficiency and large coverage to Internet of Things (IoT) applications that do not require a large bandwidth.

LoRaWAN uses radio wave technology to broadcast data within the a 20-30km range. It has the ability to broadcast a few bytes of data on a daily basis. This is sufficient for hospitals to send specific information across to external parties. An example of data transfer could be signals representing low stock in a particular type of medicine to an external medical provider. The composition of LoRaWAN is simpler than 5G and can only be used to send small parcels of data across platforms. The network could thus be used as a separate one and would free up traffic on hospitals’ existing networks used for more fundamental purposes.

LoRaWAN is generally popular in industrial and research communities because of its low power, long range, and low-cost communication characteristics. Using narrowband networks such as this would enable hospital network infrastructures use up a smaller number of devices and would provide hospital staff with certainty that data can transfer faster in and out of hospitals.