Preliminary design of Internet of Things (IoT) application for supporting mother and child health program in Indonesia

Research trends in Internet of Things (IoT) in health care show its potential to improve quality of health care. It helps to enable preventive care and promote automation to reduce the risk of human error. In Indonesia, mother and child health care is still an important agenda of the government because the maternal and child mortality rate is still high. This paper describes a preliminary design of IoT applications for supporting mother and child healthcare program. We reviewed government regulations and guidelines to determine the needs and used them as a starting point. Then we defined the networks (topology, architectures, and platform), service and application, security and technology used in the design. This multi-platform system design constitutes portable medical devices with multiple sensors for collecting medical data and sending them to server. A mobile application works as mobile gateway for the devices and as a portal for accessing context-aware personalized information related to patient's condition. It also works as communication tool for teleconsultation. All of these functionalities are supported by service applications in a cloud so that patients and caregivers can access them from anywhere at anytime. This system is designed to enable remote monitoring and early detection by medical specialist and physicians at the clinic for mother and child preventive care.