A Low-Cost Microcontroller-Based Health Monitoring System for Affordable Patient Care and Home Healthcare Environment

Physiological signal measurements provide important information about our bodies and organs. They can be used to detect potential health disorders. In recent years, with technology growth, home health care environment sees massive surge of interest in recording and monitoring physiological information. This information is used to provide higher quality of the healthcare service and address numerous financial challenges in the healthcare ecosystem. This involves physiological data acquisition devices and hence, reliable, and affordable measurement device is needed. However, physiological signal monitoring devices are often expensive, and most heath insurances do not cover the cost of such devices. In this work, an affordable personal health monitoring device prototype, based on microcontroller and capable of monitoring electrocardiogram, electromyography, oxygen saturation, body temperature and heart rate, is presented. The prototype is implemented using Arduino Uno microcontroller, Nextion touch screen display, pulse oximeter, heart rate, temperature, ECG and EMG sensors. Arduino Uno is interfaced with these sensors to collect and process the physiological data and feed them to the Nextion LCD to display the livestream of physiological signal measurements. A desktop graphical user interface is developed in Nextion Editor to send/receive data between the interface and sensors in real-time and visualize physiological signal measurements. This reconfigurable device allows a wide range of applications from affordable home health care to usage in rural area population with lack of access to care providers. The performance of the presented prototype is validated against similar commercial medical devices in home health care.