Design of a low cost smart chair for telemedicine and IoT based health monitoring: An open source technology to facilitate better healthcare

In this paper, we present a novel design of an Internet of Things (IoT) and telemedicine based health monitoring system-The Smart Chair. Sensors and associated hardware needed to monitor the vital physiological parameters of the human body are available on the chair, thereby leading to the idea of a Smart Chair. It enables the subject to be seated in a relaxed posture during the acquisition of physiological signals from various sensors attached to his/her body. The raw signals from the sensors are processed digitally by an onboard microcontroller and analyzed for any common abnormalities in the health parameters of the subject. The results are then transmitted to a secured web server using a Wi-Fi module present in the system. The data can be viewed at any later time by a doctor from any remote location on his phone/ computer that is connected to Internet. The subject can also have the results transmitted to his/her own phone using a custom Android application which receives the data from the Smart Chair using Bluetooth. The snapshot of results along with the corresponding text file can be sent as an Email/ MMS to a remote doctor for a quick feedback. The Smart Chair also sends an SMS with all the health details to a remote doctor's phone in case of an emergency, thus facilitating telemedicine in rural areas. Throughout the design phase of the system, the cost was kept minimal. The key focus of the presented work is to propose the design of a product that will be useful and easily affordable by the people of developing nations who have limited access to proper healthcare facilities. The results presented show that the proposed system is definitely a low cost affordable solution for IoT based telemedicine system, as compared to existing systems.