Remote wireless health monitoring systems

Mobile phone technology has advanced in recent year. Many innovative applications with mobile phones were implemented apart from the conventional voice data transfer. Short message service (SMS) originally developed for sending status information by the service providers have found numerous applications recently including business transactions. In this project, a prototype of a wireless health monitoring system capable of sending SMS related to the health status of the patient is developed. The project can be divided in to three stages of data acquisition, data processing and communication stages. A data acquisition stage consists of sensors to monitor the temperature and pulse rate. The sensor outputs are converted to digital form and read by a Basic Stamp microcontroller which does some processing and is sent through the serial port to the Visual Basic^TM data processing software. Various GUI forms like patient information are developed in Visual Basic to assist in data processing. Critical values of the measured data can be set; exceeding which the Visual Basic will initiate the communication unit to send SMS to the predefined mobile numbers. When anomalies are detected or a threshold is reached, the monitoring system automatically transmits the information to the doctor's hand phone on the mobile network as a SMS message via a GSM device / SMS gateway and at the same time the system will update the hospital database periodically. For each stages of the project various design options were considered and the best one is chosen. The project was successful as a prototype to send SMS regarding the patient info to the doctors. Since only a prototype was intended in this project, sensors accuracy and other data acquisition features were compromised by choosing or simulating the available sensor rather than using biomedical sensors due to cost and availability factors.