A Technical Shift in Monitoring Patients Health Using IoT

Abstract

The patient monitoring system (PMS) plays a crucial role in early detection, diagnosis, and decision support. A lot of technological shift is observed in every area of life in this world, especially in the area of telemedicine. Due to the use of communication and information transfer, it is required to enhance the current patient monitoring system. Reports indicate that before a cardiac or respiratory arrest, 84% of the patients have physiological problems (Franklin and Mathew in Crit Care Med 22(22):244–247, 1994, [1]). Moreover, sending the measured data using Internet of Things (IoT) is an advanced way of wireless communication in the present scenario. During the shift duties of nurses, sometimes the data collected by another person may be out of sight which makes it difficult for the doctor to follow up the patient’s case. Healthcare monitoring system designed in the present work will drastically reduce hospitalization, waiting time, consultation time, burden on medical staff, and overall health cost. The vital signs of patient are measured and sent to the personal computer (PC) of the doctor and on mobile phone, and to achieve this, Arduino-based microcontroller unit (MCU) is used with ESP8266 for Wi-Fi connection. Sensors for body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and tremors are connected to the MCU, and the measured readings are sent to the ThingSpeak server for web-based visualizations and to ThingView for mobile-based visualization.