This paper evaluates and characterizes the technical performance of medical
wireless personal area networks (WPANs) that are based on smartphones. For this purpose,
a prototype of a health telemonitoring system is presented. The prototype incorporates a
commercial Android smartphone, which acts as a relay point, or “gateway”, between a set
of wireless medical sensors and a data server. Additionally, the paper investigates if the
conventional capabilities of current commercial smartphones can be affected by their use
as gateways or “Holters” in health monitoring applications. Specifically, the profiling has
focused on the CPU and power consumption of the mobile devices. These metrics have
been measured under several test conditions modifying the smartphone model, the type of
sensors connected to the WPAN, the employed Bluetooth profile (SPP (serial port profile) or
HDP (health device profile)), the use of other peripherals, such as a GPS receiver, the impact
of the use of theWi-Fi interface or the employed method to encode and forward the data that
are collected from the sensors.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2009-13763-C02-0
