Visible light communication technology in digital operating room: Experiment and equipment manufacturing

Abstract

With the technology advances and implementation acceleration of medical digitization, more and more medical devices with radio frequency (RF) wireless communication capabilities are adopted in the hospitals for the conveniences and easily for the deployments. That causes the concerns on electromagnetic interference problem affecting medical safety seriously and should be considered carefully in reality. As an attractive technology, visible light communication (VLC) uses visible light offering illumination and communication at the same time. Compared with the traditional RF communication systems, VLC has significant advantages such as energy saving, easy deployment, no radio interference, electromagnetic compatibility and etc.. In this paper, the experiment utilizing VLC in the digital operating room to reduce electromagnetic interference is presented with implementation details on the test environment and both uplink and downlink hardware design and key parameters to support video/image transmission. The effectiveness of VLC system is verified to deploy in a real digital operating room and support in operation.