A Real-time, Visualization and Cloud-Linked Health Monitoring System for Disabled Elderly: Elderly Health Monitoring System

Abstract

With the aging process, the prevalence of chronic diseases and the incidence of disability among the elderly has also increased rapidly. The disabled elderly who are in bed for a long time need long-term monitoring of physiological parameters because of the serious decline of physical function. At the same time, it is also necessary to monitor the surface contact pressure between patients and nursing beds to prevent pressure ulcers. In traditional systems, physiological and stress monitoring are kept separate and are expensive and difficult to operate. Therefore, this paper proposes a real-time, visualization, and cloud-linked disabled elderly monitoring system based on WiFi technology. It can not only monitor physiological parameters in real-time but also monitor surface contact pressure. This system consists of four levels: (1) The sensor terminal nodes collect electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate (HR), oxygen saturation (SpO2), and collect interface pressure in real-time. (2) The network transport layer adopts WIFI (IEEE 802.11b) protocol. (3) The application layer designs a visual sever written by Qt software. (4) Cloud layer is deployed in the Ali-Cloud IoT server to connect to other cloud medical services. Six subjects took participated in the test and each subject was tested five times. The experimental results demonstrate that the system has a good performance to acquire data, visualize real-time, to connect clouds with a small delay.