01-09-2014, 03:23 PM
A Wireless Emergency Telemedicine System for Patients Monitoring and Diagnosis Project Report
A Wireless Emergency.pdf (Size: 1.19 MB / Downloads: 12)
Abstract
Recently, remote healthcare systems has received increasing attention in the last decade,
explaining why intelligent systems with physiology signal monitoring for e-health care is an emerging
area of development. Therefore, this study adopts system includes continuous collection and
evaluation of multiple vital signs, long-term health care, a cellular connection to a medical center in
emergency case and it transfers all acquired raw data by the internet in normal case. The proposed
system can continuously acquire four different physiological signs, e.g., ECG, SpO2, temperature and
blood pressure and further relayed to an intelligent data analysis scheme to diagnose abnormal pulses
for exploring potential chronic diseases. The proposed system also has a friendly web based interface
for medical staff to observe immediate pulse signals for remote treatment. Once abnormal event
happened or the request to real-time display vital signs is confirmed, all physiological signs will be
immediately transmitted to remote medical server through both cellular networks and internet. Also
data can be transmitted to family member mobile phone, doctor„s phone through GPRS. A prototype
of such system has been successfully developed and implemented, which will offer high standard of
healthcare with a major reduction in cost for our society.
System Design
This section describes in detail the system design based on physiological sensor, signal processing,
embedded system, and wireless communication and World Wide Web technologies. Figure (2)
illustrates the architecture of the proposed system. Section 2.1 presents an overview of the system
architecture. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 describe the system components and the detail of the system
operation procedure respectively.
System architecture
The aim of this study is to design and implement a telemedicine system with intelligent data
analysis based on physiological sensors, embedded system, wireless communication, World Wide
Web, for vital signs monitoring, patient diagnosis and homecare. Architecture of the proposed system
is shown in Figure (2). It mainly comprises the following parts.
Vital-sign signals acquisition module
Vital-sign signals acquisition module is responsible for collecting vital signs and then sends it to
processing module for ADC, processing and abnormal detection. E-health sensor shield V2.0 is
selected to work as vital sign signals acquisition module. This module can continuously acquire
physiological signs like ECG, SpO2, body temperature and blood pressure as shown in Figure (3). All
of vital signs measurements will be non-invasive measurement. Non-invasive measurement of vital
signs certainly has an advantage over its invasive counterpart due to the ease of use and lack of risks
involved in such measurements
Temperature sensor
The temperature of a healthy person is about 37 °C; it may slightly or temporarily increase in
hot environment or in physical activity, in extreme effort, the increase may be very high. It is of great
medical importance to measure body temperature. The reason is that a number of diseases are
accompanied by characteristic changes in body temperature. Likewise, the course of certain diseases
can be monitored by measuring body temperature, and the efficiency of a treatment initiated can be
evaluated by the physician. An industrial CMOS integrated-circuit temperature sensor shown in Figure
(5-a) was chosen and connected to signal conditioning circuit shown in Figure (5-b) to calibrate and
amplify the signal before feeding it to processing unit
Remote server unit
In the application of telemedicine, the medical information usually needs to be distributed among
medical doctors and display, archival, and analysis devices. Therefore, the remote server unit is
developed with the purpose of receiving, storing and distributing the vital sign data from patients. The
server is composed of presentation tier, web tier and database tier. A multi-tier architecture allows for
separation of concerns where any tier in the system can be expanded and updated with minimal or no
effect on the client tiers. The following subsections discuss the three tiers further:
Web tier
Web tier allows different users such as physicians, doctors and medical center to interact with the
server through a web interface. Remote web user will have real-time and continuous access to
patients‟ vital signs through the internet. The web user interfaces with the web components using
HTTP protocol over TCP/IP connection. The information and content are presented to the user using
an internet browser through webpage designed using Microsoft visual studio 2010. The designed web 16
page provides the most general functions of developed application in the presentation tier discussed
previously. Screen shots of the designed web page are shown in Figures (13) and (14)
Conclusion and Future Scope
This paper proposes the design and implementation of a wireless telemedicine system, in which all
physiological vital signs are transmitted to remote medical server through both cellular networks in
emergency case and internet in normal case for long term monitoring. By this way the cost of using
GSM/GPRS network is reduced as only abnormal cases will be transmitted through cellular network.
Also the proposed system presents friendly web based interface for medical staff to observe immediate
vital signs for remote treatment. Comparing this system with other systems which are mentioned in
the introduction [19]-[29], the proposed system integrates sensor unit, processing unit and
communication unit in one chip bounded to patient‟s body called mobile care unit so patient could do
his/her daily activities during monitoring. In other words, this will improve the mobility of patient.
Also the proposed system provides an ability to continuously monitor patient‟s vital health conditions
instead of the discrete measurements.
In the future, a lot of work could be done in the tree main aspects of telemedicine systems to
enhance the health care services. The three main aspects are type of sensors, signal processing
algorithms and data communication technology. In the sensor layer wireless sensor network of
wearable noninvasive sensor units can be designed. Fabrication of sensors can be improved to obtain
small size and low power sensors to improve patient‟s mobility and prolong network life time. Also we
can increase the number of transmitted vital signs to have a complete picture of patient‟s case. For
more improvement in telemedicine systems, many medical algorithms can be developed to help in
patient diagnosis, early detection of cardiovascular diseases and real-time analysis of vital signs can be
performed in the place where the vital signs are acquired. The latest achievement on a smart phone
market provided an opportunity to integrate smart phones in telemedicine systems. For example
android based mobile phones patient monitoring application could be developed which allows doctors
to monitor the health status of patient using the easy to understand User Interface (UI). This
application also provides alerts, reminders and emergency notifications for vital measurements to help
doctors to take timely decisions in emergency situations