Remote Health-Monitoring of First Responders over TETRA Links

TL;DR

This paper proposes a remote health-monitoring system for first responders using TETRA radio links, demonstrating its feasibility and performance in delivering timely health data and alerts despite limited data support.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel health-monitoring system over TETRA links, optimizing for Age-of-Information to ensure timely health status updates.

Findings

TETRA can support health-monitoring data with tolerable delay and message loss.

Optimizing for Age-of-Information improves monitoring timeliness.

System effectively provides health alerts via electrotactile stimuli.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a system for remote health-monitoring of first responders over TETRA radio links. The system features a smart garment that periodically records and sends physiological parameters of first responders to a remote agent, which processes the recordings and feeds back the health-status notifications and warnings in the form of electrotactile stimuli. The choice of TETRA as the connectivity solution is driven by its routine use by first responders all over the world, thus representing a convenient and economically-effective connectivity basis. Although the support for data communications in TETRA is rather limited and in practice reduced to the Short Data Service, we show that TETRA can serve the intended purpose in the considered scenario, achieving tolerable delay and message-loss performance. Moreover, when the system is examined and optimized in terms of the peak Age-of-Information, a metric suitable to characterize the quasi-periodic nature of the monitoring process, its performance becomes rather favorable, enabling timely monitoring of the first responders' health status.