Bluetooth medical profile
For the wireless transmission of medical data, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group( BSIG) has standardized a Bluetooth Medical Profile with the Health Device Profile( HDP). With the Personal Health Data( PHD), IEEE11073 has adopted another specification for medical data. The standardization enables medical data to be exchanged between devices from different manufacturers.
The standardization concerns the structure of the data packets and also the packaging of the data. The entire protocol stacks are defined in the Bluetooth profiles, including the application layer. This makes Bluetooth devices interoperable with each other. In addition, the Bluetooth profiles have the advantage that the devices remain limited to their specific applications.
The Bluetooth Medical Profile consists of the transmission protocol, which can be used for medical data in the Bluetooth protocol stack, and the part in which the data structure is defined. In the latter, reference is made to the IEEE 11073 specification, which defines the data exchange between medical devices on different transmission media. The Bluetooth Medical Profile is designed to be more complex than other Bluetooth profiles because it must transmit medical data from different sensors in parallel. Therefore, this Bluetooth profile includes another protocol for multiplexing.
Bluetooth Medical Profiles are used in home patient monitoring, but also in hospitals and doctors' offices.