Design and Implementation of a Wireless Health Monitoring System for Remotely Located Patients

Abstract

Remote health monitoring is regarded as a hot topic in the arena of research. Though the number of aged people is increasing, it is irrefutable that the need of a disperse medical care system providing remote monitoring intending to reduce the escalating healthcare expenditure is very urgent. Moreover, World Health organization reported, in Bangladesh, about 17% of deaths are caused by cardiovascular diseases. Continual health monitoring and rapid detection can save up to 60% of lives. For these reasons, a wireless, wearable, low cost and automatic health monitoring system is a suitable solution. The implemented project described in this paper is a user- friendly, wearable and continuous monitoring system of blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature, which can communicate with requested Android devices through Bluetooth. The system mainly consists of IR transmitter, receiver, LM-35, MPXV 5050GP, the data acquisition unit, microcontroller (i.e., Arduino) and Bluetooth. Bluetooth is used for its better transmission rate than ZigBee and cost-efficiency than GSM. In addition, all the measured readings and communications are password protected. A free and user- friendly Android application is attributed to demonstrate the readings. The proposed system has been field tested to ensure dependability and exactitude. The test results showed that this system could measure the patient‘s physiological data with high accuracy. The system can be easily segregated from the previous works for its maximum number of data collection, real-time monitoring, security issues and cost-effectiveness.