MediSuit: Wearable health monitoring system for elders and bed-ridden patients

As people get older, the body gets weaker and it starts showing signs and symptoms of chronic diseases like cardio vascular diseases, diabetes, or even conditions of stress and depression. These signs may be increased heart rate, unusually low blood saturation level, or abnormal body temperature. Most of the time these signs go unnoticed and hence the patients are not diagnosed. By the time they become aware of their illness it might be too late. The weakening health, the chances of skin related problems, bed sores etc are becoming critical in case of bed ridden patients. A simple, compact, wearable, and user-friendly electronic device for continuous monitoring of health parameters is the need of the hour. The proposed MediSuit is wearable, unobtrusive clothing with embedded sensors which measure different physiological parameters and transmit them to a central processor which decides whether to raise an alert depending critical nature of these parameters. The central controller uses a GSM modem to communicate with a smartphone application which shows these parameters graphically as plots and graphs. The GSM modem also alerts the caretakers when the parameters cross the predetermined threshold values, by sending a message to their mobile phones.