Internet of Medical Things for cardiac monitoring: Paving the way to 5G mobile networks

Abstract

Health and medical care are considered as one of the most fascinating applications that can fully benefit from the IoT deployment. In this work, we built a prototype of the Internet of Medical Things (IMedT) for monitoring cardiac activity in the form of phonocardiograph (PCG) signal. The prototype comprises of an agent and a manager. An agent runs a special task to collect heart sound signals and conditioning the signals. A manager, on the other hand, performs some tasks including: (i) gathering signal from some an agent or sensor node, (ii) operated as a web server to make the data available online locally and globally for doctors in order that the data can be accessed anywhere with certain authorization schemes, (iii) it is equipped with ability to do data mirroring to a data center in the cloud system in such a way that the most updated file can be copied to the targeted location to ensure the authorized healthcare providers and doctors anywhere around the globe to get the latest heart sound data for cardiac monitoring and diagnosing. Some issues regarding future development of the IMedT system were presented including smart diagnosis capability, security issues, and extension to the 6LoPAN as well as its compliance to the emerging 5G mobile networks.