13-09-2014, 04:10 PM
SECURE REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING SYSTEM
SECURE REMOTE.pdf (Size: 556.22 KB / Downloads: 25)
ABSTRACT
The design of portable low cost systems for remote monitoring of
patients with chronic diseases is one of the most important fields in
telemedicine and telecare. Using Bluetooth communication
technology, which can be added to some medical equipment, may
enhance the efficiency of patient monitoring. In this paper a low
cost, secure portable system with wireless transmission is presented
to monitor vital parameters such as heart rate, O2 level ...etc.
Transmitted data is archived and visualized both on a mobile phone
and on a central server.
INTRODUCTION
The applications of mobile telemedicine systems are rapidly
growing especially in the remote monitoring of patients far from a
reference hospital. These systems have to be embedded in low cost,
small/light devices with low power consumption, and should have a
user-friendly interface.
Incorporating technologies such as Bluetooth, GPRS, GSM or
Wi-Fi to these systems allow wireless transmission to hospitals or
emergency centers [1]-[4]. This paper describes a low cost, secure
portable system with wireless transmission capabilities for the
acquisition, processing, storing and real time visualization of the
vital patient’s health parameters (e.g. heart rate, oxygen saturation
in blood (SpO2) etc...) to a mobile phone or a PC.
Most mobile telemedicine systems available so far, sample the
data acquired, store it for a short duration and then transmit it to the
desired destination [5], [6]. Most of these available systems lack
the ability to alert the medical team or the nearby personnel of any
serious situation of the patient.
Several applications have been developed [7] to remotely
monitor the ECG. They were applied either to samples obtained
from standard databases [8], or samples development by the ECG
module [9]. Others [10], [11], have proposed techniques for signal
processing via software to reduce noise or to classify heart
pathologies.
In this work, a mobile set is used as a simulation of a pulse
oximeter representing the acquisition module. This module, with
wireless transmission capabilities (Bluetooth, WIFI and
GSM/GPRS), is a tool for sending real time secure data.
MATERIALS AND METHOD
The proposed system depends on the integration of three fields:
mobile communications, PC applications and security software.
Development environment
• The J2ME-Wireless Toolkit allowed developing
application in regular inexpensive mobile devices.
• Visual studio 2008 is used to develop and test the PC
application.
• SQL server 2005 is used to create the database structure of
the hospital database.
• BouncyCastel library by J2ME language was used to
implement the security in the mobile and BouncyCastel
library by C# language on the PC application
• Sony Ericsson model W810i mobile phone was used to run
the mobile application
PC Software
The application for the PC is developed using Microsoft Visual
Studio 2008. Bluetooth communication is programmed using the
wireless communication library (.NET edition).
The hospital server receives data from the sending module via
Bluetooth (implemented using the wireless communication library)
Security Software
Securing process divided into two parts encoding process at the
sender side (patient/nurse mobile application) and decoding process
at the server side (hospital server). Message integrity is maintained
by using hashing function HMAC, which allows data integrity and
data origin authentication [18], [19] (hashing algorithm SHA1 was
used because of its popularity and efficiency [20]) and the
confidentiality, is maintained by using symmetric encryption
authentication [21], [22].
Figure 6 shows an overview of the steps involved in the
encoding process.
RESULTS
Patient mobile application was able to transmit successfully and
securely the patient vital signals via Bluetooth or internet to the
hospital server. The signals received by the Bluetooth-enabled PC
were fed as input to the patient mobile. The hospital server received
the signals securely and saved it to the database. In case of critical
situations, these signals were transmitted to the emergency server
successfully. Figure 9 shows the “Send Medical Data” screenFigure 10 shows a snapshot of the Bluetooth hospital server,
making log to all events happened ex. Connected or Disconnected,
Mobile name connected to the server and the message content the
server has received from the mobile.
CONCLUSIONS
For ‘an anywhere at anytime’ monitoring system, devices used
have to be widely available. Hence, we recommend the usage of
mobile phones as the core of these monitoring systems. In this
paper a low cost, yet secure system for vital data acquisition and
visualization in mobile devices is developed. Its design allows for
easy technological updates and further development to provide
more intelligence to the system. Incorporating technologies such as
Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS, and the development of software tools
both for a computer and for mobile devices enables a wide range of
application scenarios. As a future enhancement, we recommend the
usage of GPS & GIS for effective rescue of patient from any
location by ambulance in the cases of cardiac emergency. Also,
integrating the software applications with HL7 standard and
connection of the PC application to a hospital database will be a
great improvement