A real-time health monitoring and warning system

Abstract

Health-related issues have been regarded as one of the major problems which directly impact quality of life of an individual and development of the nation. Avoidance of health monitoring negatively results in many aspects. Current medical system lacks of preventive medicine application which efficiently prevents and relieves disease prevalence. Deficiency of medical personnel affects the quality of treatment, care and nursing. Computer technology has been currently applied to several domains in order to yield better performance. Wearable devices have become usable and applicable to sense several vital signs and communicate them with other networked nodes via the Internet. In this paper, “UbiNurSS - A Ubiquitous Nursing Support System” has been developed for nursing support. UbiNurSS employs available devices which are capable of measuring pulse which reflects pulse or heart rate and blood pressure. A smaller, cheaper computer-equivalent device - Raspberry Pi, has also been used. UbiNurSS consists of two sub-systems - a Raspberry Pi based which is physically located at the patient room, and a web application based which facilitates the nurse’s tasks at a nursing station. The pulse report and corresponding warning can be generated in real-time. We demonstrate applicability of UbiNurSS in terms of communication ranges, concurrent pulse deliveries without interference and insignificant differences of the measurements in comparison to traditional devices.