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The emergence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in healthcare applications is gaining momentum through the increasing array of wearable vital sign sensors and location tags which can track both healthcare personnel and patient status/ location continuously in real-time mode. Despite the increased range of potential application frameworks -ranging from pre-hospital, in-hospital, ambulatory and home monitoring, to long-term database collection for longitudinal trend analysis -the security gap between existing WSN designs and the requirements of medical applications remains unresolved.Generally, WSN devices are extremely limited in terms of power, computation, and communication. They are often deployed in accessible areas, thus increasing security vulnerabilities. The dynamic ad hoc topology, multicast transmission, location awareness, critical data prioritisation, and co-ordination of diverse sensors of healthcare applications further exacerbate the security challenges. This paper presents an analysis of various WSN security mechanisms from the demanding perspective of healthcare applications, and considers the importance of security to the successful deployment of pervasive computing solutions in the healthcare industry.

Wireless telemedicine is a new and evolving area in telemedical and telecare systems. Healthcare personnel require realtime access to accurate patient data, including clinical histories, treatments, medication, tests, laboratory results and insurance information. With large-scale wireless networks and mobile computing solutions, such as cellular 3G, Wi-Fi mesh and WiMAX, healthcare personnal can tap into vital information anywhere and at any time within the healthcare networks. The recent introduction of pervasive computing, consisting of radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth, ZigBee, and wireless sensor networks, further extends the potential for exploitation of wireless telecommunications and its integration into new mobile healthcare delivery systems.In this paper, snapshots of current uses and future trends of various wireless communications in the healthcare domain are highlighted. Special attention is given to the challenges of a telemedicine environment equipped with different wireless technologies and how the resulting issues might be addressed in medical services integration to provide flexible, convenient and economical medical monitoring, consultation and healthcare.

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The increasing demand for wireless network services have resulted a plethora of studies on the efficient management of radio resources to improve network capacity. As radio spectrum is a scarce resource, sharing of radio frequency has to be considered among wireless network nodes and by doing so introduces interference among users, which in turn limit the network capacity. Our study addresses the problem of dynamically assign channels in ad-hoc wireless networks via power control in order to satisfy their minimum QoS requirements. The objective then is to maximize the number of co-channel links subject to some stability conditions. In order to assign the optimal number of co-channel nodes that can co-exist over a wide range of operating SINR values, we propose two novel ways to find the optimal combination of co-channel links so that a feasible power vector can be found within its power limits.