Abstract
In many areas of the world accessing professional physicians “when needed/as needed” might not be always possible for a variety of reasons. Therefore, in such cases, a targeted e-Health solution to safeguard patient long-term health could be a meaningful approach. Today’s modern healthcare technologies, often built around electronic and computer-based equipment, require an access to a reliable electricity supply. Many healthcare technologies and products also presume access to the high speed internet is available, making them unsuitable for use in areas where there is no fixed-line internet connectivity, access is slow, unreliable, and expensive, yet where the most benefit to patients may be gained. In this paper, a full mobile sensor platform is presented, based around readily-purchased consumer components, to facilitate a low cost and efficient means of monitoring the health of patients with prosthetic lower limbs. This platform is designed such that it can also be operated in a standalone mode, i.e., in the absence of internet connectivity, thereby making it suitable to the developing world. Also, to counter the challenge of power supply issues in e-Health monitoring, a self-contained rechargeable solution to the platform is proposed and demonstrated. The platform works with an Android mobile device, in order to allow for the capture of data from a wireless sensor unit, and to give the clinician access to results from the sensors. The results from the analysis, carried out within the platform’s Raspberry Pi Zero, are demonstrated to be of use for remote monitoring. This is specifically targeted for monitoring the tissue health of lower limb amputees. The monitoring of residual limb temperature and gait can be a useful indicator of tissue viability in lower limb amputees especially those suffering from diabetes. We describe a route wherein non-invasive monitoring of tissue health is achievable using the Gaussian process technique. This knowledge will be useful in establishing biomarkers related to a possible deterioration in a patient’s health or for assessing the impact of clinical interventions.
Highlights
With the recent advances in internet and mobile communications devices, along with ubiquitous computing, there has been a tremendous growth in the field of wearable technologies
Wearable sensor systems for biomedical applications in gait monitoring can be used in two different ways: one is about walking feature assessment for daily physical activities [23]–[30], wherein the data obtained from inertial sensors - accelerometer or gyroscope, are directly used as inputs of some inference techniques; and another direction is for determining the joint angle, body position and orientation accurately by fusing the data of different inertial sensors so as to decrease the errors of the quantitative human motion analysis [31]
In order to bring about the benefits of being able to use this technology in areas of the developing world where there is no reliable network connectivity or electricity, the sensor platform has been designed to be both low power and low cost
Summary
With the recent advances in internet and mobile communications devices, along with ubiquitous computing, there has been a tremendous growth in the field of wearable technologies. While the technologies and principles considered as candidates may already exist, to date, no such early warning system has been implemented and, as such a continuous monitoring system to provide an early warning of tissue damage presents a novel approach to injury prevention. This approach can especially be useful for rural and impoverished countries, wherein the doctors’ work with limited resources and challenging conditions and often may not be available at short notice. Sensor data has been reliably collected, transmitted and stored in a secure local server for post processing, allowing medical authorities to access and review user data to identify any possible deterioration in tissue health which could be indicators of residual limb volume fluctuation
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