With the advancement of communication technologies, the number of devices connected to the internet is increasing exponentially day by day. Multiple IoT applications have been evolved since recent past. Low power consumption, accuracy of transmission and robustness takes the center stage in developing these applications. IEEE 802.15.4 is a low power protocol for low range low data rate scenario. In this paper, we propose a minimal error modified IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver for IoT applications in health care. The health-care scenario, due to its critical nature, calls for an error free communication. We propose a modified frequency offset estimator which performs better in terms of error variance than the existing estimators for IEEE 802.15.4. The simulation result shows that the bit error rate and packet error rate performance of the proposed transceiver are significantly improved compared to the standard architecture. The proposed transceiver reduces the power consumption due to less number of retransmission per packet for successful transmission of the packet. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.