SMS-based platform for cardiovascular tele-monitoring

The focus of this paper is to describe a fully automatic platform to transmit, using the SMS service, medical data collected at home. The overall platform has two main components: a central server for SMS receiving (Central Receiving Unit, CRU) and the remote sending data collection and transmitting units (Home Transmitting Unit, HTU). HTU is connected to commercial meters of arterial pressure and blood glucose, and to a stepcounter. The CRU is located in a clinical center and acts also as a server for the database housing and for the users applications (data display, trend visualizations, alarms). Five platforms (CRU+5HTU) have been realized and given to patients. During a cumulative monitoring period of 251 days, there were 175 data transfer sessions, a mean of 35 plusmn 20 per patient. The stability of the telemonitoring system and the mean percentage of successful encoding of the transmitted data were 100%.