International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications, 3(3), 1-11, July-September 2012 1 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Diffuse Link, Infrared Technology (IR), Line of Sight Optical Wireless Channel, Link Misalignments, Mobile Healthcare Monitoring, Outage Probability 1. INTRODUCTION The development of personalized health (p- health) systems requires ensuring reliable com- munication with high qualities of service, espe- cially in sensitive environments. For example, it is important to ensure the communication links between the patient and the hospital care units in order to have a continuous monitoring so that the hospital staff can detect early pathological markers and overcome patient troubles. For high critical cases, continuous monitoring is done Infrared Communication Technology Applied to Indoor Mobile Healthcare Monitoring System S. S. Torkestani, Université de Limoges, France S. Sahuguede, Université de Limoge, France A. Julien-Vergonjanne, Université de Limoges, France J. P. Cances, Université de Limoges, France J. C. Daviet, Université de Limoges, France ABSTRACT In the context of healthcare monitoring, it is necessary to transmit vital information from the patient to an interface managed by the hospital staff. In this paper, the authors consider a system in which a patient can move within a hospital room and the data collected by sensors are transmitted to a distant receiver placed on the ceiling. The authors investigate the potentiality of using infrared communications for the transmis- sion of information in this mobile context, by considering the simplest modulation scheme based on On-Off Keying (OOK) technique. In order to represent patient mobility in the room, the authors use a model for the patient location based on a Gaussian distribution over the three axes of mobility in the room. In addition, they consider different scenarios, considering either a Line Of Sight (LOS) confguration or a diffuse one. From the obtained results, the authors can determine by evaluating the transmission probability of outage, the potentiality of this technology to ensure the communication between sensors and the collecting point. DOI: 10.4018/jehmc.2012070101