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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @11:17AM
Jenkins: The patient has no pulse, doctor
Dr. Markov: Emergency defibrilation, NOW
Jenkins: It's not working doctor, it's not working
Dr. Markov: Damnit Jenkins, get out of the line-of-sight of the li-fi heart-rate monitor! You moron!
This is all great but cables can snake around things when doctors are hanging over your body, lifi... not so much
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Friday August 28 2015, @12:21PM
This failure mode can be fixed: make distinct sounds for "no pulse" and "lost connection". Likewise, the photosensitive epilepsy trigger problem alluded to at the end of the summary is fixable by using a DC-free code to ensure that the intensity variation below 60 Hz is near zero.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday August 28 2015, @07:32PM
That works for me as long as they don't eliminate the sticky contacts for the cables. It would ruin my "I am Scaramanga" line.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2015, @12:03AM
At last! Someone else who has the same compulsion to say that!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:42PM
Easy fix: Instead of IR, use X-Rays. Problem solved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @12:40PM
The Bottomless Railroad will do that to you.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 28 2015, @02:22PM
Li-Fi? Light fidelity? And for that matter, why do we have "wireless fidelity" for wireless?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 28 2015, @03:15PM
Because Ri-Fi sounds racist.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday August 28 2015, @04:16PM
And for that matter, why do we have "wireless fidelity" for wireless?
Huh. I.. I never thought of it before. Why the hell do we use that term??
(Score: 4, Informative) by draconx on Friday August 28 2015, @06:32PM
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] to the rescue:
(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.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.