A Vital Sign Monitoring System Exploiting BT/BLE on Low-cost Commercial Smartwatch for Home Care Patients

Abstract

Home care is a service that can be used to monitor and assist patients treated at home, such as self-isolation patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. These patients need to be intensively monitored, but currently, there is no affordable vital sign monitoring system. The focus of the problem in this study is exploiting cheap commercial BT/BLE smartwatches as a component in a vital sign monitoring system for home care patients. The second problem is the proof of concept of using the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) as a method for monitoring the condition of home care patients in this monitoring system. The results of system testing are acceptable and in accordance with the needs of patients and medical personnel. Meanwhile, the results of validating the vital sign measurement by a smartwatch are not significantly different from medical equipment; the two-tailed P value equals 0.8236. This study contributes techniques and procedures for solving these two problems so that other researchers and practitioners can use them to build similar systems using other BT/BLE devices.