An Efficient Wireless Health Monitoring System

Abstract

Until now the exact method of monitoring patients in hospitals is to make the patients lay down on the bed, connect appropriate sensors for monitoring. This method of monitoring may be uncomfortable due to various reasons. To monitor the increased number of patients, a large number of trained medical professionals and doctors are required. Due to this shortage of trained medical professionals, uninterrupted patient monitoring systems have drawn significant attention during the current decade. A large number of cost-effective versions of patient monitoring systems are available, which were being utilized by authorized health care professionals. In addition to this there is a strong need for web based patient monitoring system using internet of things (IoT) technologies, when the patient is not in the hospital. The goal of this paper is to design and implement a low cost, portable effective patient monitoring system that can transmit the vital signs of a patient in emergency situation continuously through a wireless communication network system. Various sensors such as pulse, temperature, blood pressure and fingerprint are interfaced with the microcontroller for measuring the important physical parameters of a patient. For wireless transmission, these sensors are connected to a sensor node through GSM module. Raspberry-Pi is used as a sensor node as it has better features compared to the other microcontrollers. The developed system includes hardware such as Raspberry Pi 3 model B, blood pressure sensor, temperature, Pulse-oximeters and GSM module. The developed hardware prototype was tested successfully on four patients and satisfactory readings have been monitored on the display.