Design and implementation of the Vital Sign Box for home healthcare

The present PC technology is at the necessary and sufficient level for telecommunication based home healthcare service. We developed a PC based terminal (Vital Sign Box, VSB) and field tested it. As a result, we found that lighter and lower VSBs that could configure flexibly were required. To solve these problems, we shifted the hardware platform to an embedded PC (WindowsCE machine) and implemented a novel data input interface by using a character recognition technique. The resources of the embedded PC are smaller than PCs, but we found that embedded PC based VSB capabilities were sufficient. Also the character recognition data input interface separates the sensor interface from the hardware platform of VSBs. In the future, we will be able to see different forms of VSBs such as software VSB point-tool, by using the presented data input interface.