Telecommunication integration in e-healthcare: technologies, applications and challenges

The technological advancements in sensing, signal processing, computing and communication have had great influence in different aspect of our lives. One of the fields that benefit from these technologies is health care. Trustworthiness of sensors, electronic devices, networks and wireless communications have matured enough to replace traditional legacy systems. However, there remains unexplored aspects of e-healthcare especially considering the challenges in service provisioning, integration and resource optimization. Pervasive and continuous health monitoring is an important service, and it specifically provides the elderly and chronically ill patients with continuous and seamless health monitoring, benefiting both of them and the caretakers. In this survey article, we review and discuss different elements of e-healthcare, introduce wireless transmission technologies that are used in e-healthcare, present the quality of service (QoS) requirements and discuss the potential challenges as in security and privacy of data, power allocation, scheduling, meeting the QoS needs and confronting the electromagnetic interference. Some of the future research directions in healthcare areas are also discussed. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.