A Novel Implementation for Automated Health Monitoring System

The concept of automated health monitoring system is taken from Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). The proposed system model assists the doctor in analysing the health record of the patient and helps in proper diagnosis. A lot of researches are taking place in the wearable sensor field in recent years. Wearable sensors are in contact with the human body and monitor his or her physiological parameters. One can buy variety of sensors in the market today such as pulse monitors, oximetry monitors, moisture monitors etc. The cost of the sensors varies according to their size, flexibility and accuracy. Some literature surveys related to the work are discussed here.

Chin Teng Lin and others [2] presented the idea of dry EEG sensor based mobile wireless system which aims at recording the EEG signals and evaluation of driver vigilance. Grantham K.H. Pang [4] proposed the idea of Responsive health monitoring system which provides automated data analysis and response to the collected data. However this idea requires the human intervention to upload the data into the web portal. Purnima and Puneet singh [1] proposed an idea of Zigbee based health monitoring system in which the patients vital parameters are continuously measured and the data is sent to the centralised ARM controller for data analysis. The data so collected is updated to the doctor PC via Zigbee receiver module. The range of coverage is less since the presented idea covers only few meters. Another drawback of the system is that it is using less calibrated heart beat sensor. In the proposed idea the author is aiming at improving the range of coverage to LAN from personal Area Network (PAN) by building a personal server and the work is also employing highly accurate and low cost heart beat sensor from Sparkfun Corporation and Li2 Technologies.

The proposed system model is described using block diagram and flow chart. The block diagram as shown in the Figure 1 has three different phases namely data acquisition phase, data transmission phase and data displaying phase. In data acquisition phase the vital parameters of the patient are gathered using the physiological sensors. In this proposed idea temperature sensor and heart beat sensors are employed. In data transmission phase the collected data is sent to the local server using Zigbee technology. In the final phase i.e. data display phase a web page is built and the data acquired is displayed on the web page using raspberry pi which is acting as local server. C. Software Details 1) X-CTU Tool: This is XBEE chip configuration tool given by Digi internationals. Through this software utility tool XBEE chips can be configure as Coordinator, router or end devices. One chip can be configured as transmitter and other as receiver to set up a simple Zigbee network. 2) Python programming environment: Raspberry Pi is configured as a personal web server using python programming. The reason for using Python is that it is an interpreted language and it has very large library in terms of Terabytes. It is easy to maintain the code and it provides interface to all commercial data bases. So, python platform is chosen over other programming platforms. Figure 12 shows the front end web page view. This web page displays the variation of temperature in the form of graph and also the current heart beats in terms of per minute.

Initially the sensors are placed on the patient body at the strategic places. Depending upon the sensors used the data corresponding to that physiological parameter is captured by the sensors which are given to microcontroller for data analysis. The processed data is sent to the XBEE chip which is acting as a wireless module to transmit data. The data sent from the XBEE router is received at the XBEE coordinator and the data is subsequently stored in the data base by Raspberry Pi. Raspberry is pre configured to store the data. As a next stage Raspberry is configured as personal web server which can be accessed by any devices that gets connected to that LAN. A web interface is developed which provides user interface to display the data.

This proposed idea is based on ZIGBEE technology which is more cost effective compared to Bluetooth. The range of communication cab be improved by developing ZIGBEE networks. This proposed idea aims at using a low cost but accurate sensors which monitors the vital parameters of the patient more accurately thus assisting the doctor in the better diagnosis.

The health monitoring system proposed in this paper is developed with the aim of providing the doctors the much needed patient health history in real time. This will assist the physicians in proper diagnosis and treatment. This topic is one of the hot cake for researchers. The Apple Corporation has launched a watch which can sense the heart beat and display it in the UI screen. The heart beat sensor employed in this paper works almost on the same principle employed by Apple watches in measuring the heart beats.

This content is AI-processed based on open access ArXiv data.