Imagine if you could eliminate the tangle of wires that snake across a hospital patient's body so machines can monitor his or her vital signs. Sounds like a great idea. But wirelessly transmitting data from the patient to the machines cluttering hospital rooms creates the risk of electromagnetic interference. So one group of researchers in South Korea is proposing that some machines use Li-Fi instead.
The team used visible light communications, also known as Li-Fi, to transmit readings from an electroencephalograph (EEG) over a distance of about 50 centimeters. "It's a very much friendlier means of transmitting biomedical signals in a hospital," says Yeon Ho Chung, an engineer at Pukyong National University in Busan. The group described their work in the IEEE Sensors Journal.
Li-Fi would benefit places that experience a lot of interference from crowded wifi nodes as well, as long as there are no side effects.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday August 28 2015, @03:22PM
why go with visible light when you can use near-infrared? one is annoying and blinks like mad and the other is invisible to humans.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 28 2015, @07:57PM
Can you really see a light blinking at 240,000 Hertz? And I suspect it would be a lot faster than that.
The annoying thing is it would require a lot of dome shaped mirrors. And some way of doing multi-path resolution. (IIRC, this *is* a solved problem, but it does take extra work.)
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