Wearable sensors and component-based design for home health care

Recent technology trends indicate that truly cost-effective home health care systems of the future will be constructed from distributed, plug-and-play, commodity components assembled on-the-fly to match the needs of a given patient. This paper describes early efforts in the Medical Component Design Laboratory: a research and teaching laboratory where component technologies developed for research will support student projects in closely related engineering courses. Two component-based prototypes are presented in this paper: a Bluetooth-enabled personal monitoring system and a plug-and-play pulse oximeter.