Integrated and Scalable Architecture for Providing Cost-Effective Remote Health Monitoring

Global demographic trends clearly point out that the world population is ageing owing to a combination of dropping mortality rates and increasing life expectancy. The global community is looking for ways to address the pressing societal challenge of providing effective and efficient healthcare to the elderly. It is difficult to achieve satisfactory results merely by relying on scaling up of conventional healthcare infrastructure as the conventional techniques will not be sufficient to assist the elderly to independently live in house especially if they are suffering from chronic diseases, thus require continuous health monitoring. It is imperative to exploit the advances in emerging technologies such as biosensors, mobile devices, and communication networks to provide remote health monitoring services along with the physical infrastructural facilities. Remote/continuous monitoring of patients with chronic diseases is being considered as an efficient and cost-effective solution, which will reduce the burden on the elderly as well as on the health authorities and the government's expenses. While considerable research and development is being undertaken in this field, most of the current state of the art reflects a lack of a concerted and cohesive approach to develop an integrated remote health monitoring system. The present paper proposes a novel healthcare monitoring system based on an integrated and scalable architecture which provides flexibility and enables interoperability between myriads of healthcare monitoring devices and products.