PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Medical emergencies are life-threatening situations which need immediate interventions. Response to such emergency situation will depend upon the resources available at that instant. A response time of any healthcare system will make a difference between life and death of a victim. In this work, the authors investigated the performance of various routing protocols for Ad Hoc network application in healthcare services for emergency situations where the data from the patients were collected via wearable devices. The comparison study is done to test the suitability of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for such m-health applications established through an ad hoc network. The established network, however, diagnoses the patient's parameters on real-time basis and sends the data to the doctors and to a database within the hospital, which is constantly monitored, creating a virtual Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for a victim so as to address any abnormal behaviour during remote process. The proposed architecture was designed with the aim to manage emergency situations by reducing delays and increase the effectiveness of the patient monitoring mechanism in situations where the delay in providing medical aid to the patient maked a difference to his / her survival. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the study, an Electrocardiogram (ECG) pattern of a patient was monitored on real-time basis. A custom packet frame was designed for data transmission having a special field to store ECG data along with other general information as per the packet standards.