Green telemedicine : Energy efficient healthcare monitoring

Green communication is becoming an important design consideration for healthcare and medical informatics due to a combination of factors such as soaring energy costs and global warming. One popular application of telemedicine is remote patient monitoring through utilization of wireless communication technology. As this kind of telemedicine system involves the use of various data acquisition and transmission devices that operate under a vast variety of environmental conditions, optimizing both energy efficiency and operational reliability under continuously changing environment brings great challenges to virtually all parties concerned, from system developers to end users (patients) and healthcare professionals. To address the need for implementing green computing and communications in telemedicine, this chapter provides an overview of implementation with assistive smart home technology followed by an in-depth analysis of different mainstream methodologies in optimizing energy consumption while maintaining operational reliability. These include tools such as prognostics and health management (PHM) and network management systems (NMS).