  Pervasive healthcare is a promising assisted-living solution for chronic
patients. However, current cutting-edge communication technologies are not able
to strictly meet the requirements of these applications, especially in the case
of life-threatening events. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a new
architecture to support indoor healthcare monitoring, with a focus on epileptic
patients. Several novel elements are introduced. The first element is the
cascading of a WLAN and a cellular network, where IEEE 802.11ax is used for the
wireless local area network to collect physiological and environmental data
in-home and 5G-enabled Fixed Wireless Access links transfer them to a remote
hospital. The second element is the extension of the network slicing concept to
the WLAN, and the introduction of two new slice types to support both regular
monitoring and emergency handling. Moreover, the inclusion of local computing
capabilities at the WLAN router, together with a mobile edge computing
resource, represents a further architectural enhancement. Local computation is
required to trigger not only health-related alarms, but also the network
slicing change in case of emergency: in fact, proper radio resource scheduling
is necessary for the cascaded networks to handle healthcare traffic together
with other promiscuous everyday communication services. Numerical results
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach while highlighting the
performance gain achieved with respect to baseline solutions.
