eHealth (Electronic Health) is an emerging medical service paradigm, which employs information processing and communications to enhance traditional medical services. Among key enabling technologies, wireless communications provide the medical services with mobility and service availability. Despite its beneficial applications, an extensive use of wireless communications can interfere with electromagnetic interference-sensitive medical devices. The interference can cause malfunctioning of those medical devices and potentially harm the patients who are using those medical devices.

In this context, cognitive radio, which is implemented based on software defined radio, is a promising technique for providing wireless eHealth applications. A cognitive radio transceiver can observe, learn (the status of the operating environment), make decision, and adapt the wireless transmission parameters under stringent constraints on EMI to those biomedical devices. In a hospital environment, different eHealth applications can be provided through cognitive radio devices which use dynamic spectrum access strategies.

The objective of this project is to develop dynamic spectrum access techniques for cognitive radio to provide eHealth applications. In developing these techniques, the constraints on transmission power and frequency usage to access the available spectrum will be taken into account so that the required application quality of services (e.g. latency, throughput) can be achieved without disrupting the services of biomedical equipments using RF wireless transmissions.

At this stage of the project, we are developing a cognitive radio system architecture for a hospital environment Our focus is on developing dynamic spectrum access techniques for this system which is assumed to operate in unlicensed bands (e.g. ISM bands). An EMI (Electromagnetic Interference)-aware cognitive radio transmission scheme for unlicensed band is proposed. The system performance for this transmission scheme is currently being analyzed.