Design and development of a health monitoring system to link chronic disease patients with Doctors at Home: Case of hypertension

Abstract

Heart health is one of the parameters of one's health condition. Besides using the ECG machine, heart conditions can be determined through blood pressure, and heart beat rate measurements. In order to so provide efficient medical services at appropriate time, patient’s health status should continuously be monitored and this requires that the blood pressure and heart beat rate measurements are continuously recorded and checked. Based on last decade statistics of medical records, death rates due to hypertensive heart disease shows that the blood pressure is a crucial risk factor for atherosclerosis and heart diseases, thus, preventive measures should be taken against high blood pressure which provide the ability to track, trace and save patient’s life at the right time. For this, we designed and developed a health monitoring system that can be used to take health status measurements and send the data to the doctor in real time, the data can be analyzed and immediate action or measure to save patient’s life can be taken with less cost and without a delay. We focused on monitoring the patient’s blood pressure, heart beat rate, location and his/her body temperature and where the data are recorded using this system automatically transmit the measurements via Short Message Service (SMS) to the doctor or the medical expert. The objective of this work is providing an effective application for Real Time Health Monitoring and Tracking. The system will track, trace, monitor patients and facilitate taking care of their health so efficient medical services could be provided at appropriate time. By using prototyping method and specific sensors, data have been captured and compared with a configurable threshold defined by a specialized doctor who follows the patient via microcontroller. We used heart beat sensor to collect data and microcontroller to condition and process data, we also used key for user input, LCD to display data to the user and GSM module to send data to doctor. In any case of emergency, a short message service (SMS) will be sent to the Doctor’s mobile number along with the measured values through GSM module. Furthermore, the GPS provides the position information of the monitored person who is under surveillance all the time. If we consider the terms of cost, settings and time, this system will be the most effective due it low cost compared to existing, more patient can afford this system and the ability to capture and transmit real-time health status make it superior to existing systems and device data are reliable than any other system currently available at local market.