Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network based health monitoring System for Hypertensive Patient"

ABSRACT

Hypertensive-patient monitoring usually requires the use of non-invasive sensors that are

hardwired to bedside monitors. This set-up is cumbersome, forcing the patient to be

confined to his hospital bed thereby not allowing him to move around freely within the

hospital premises. Presently, in order to continuously track a patient's Blood Pressure

(BP) remotely over a period of time, physicians hand over specialized devices to patients.

Most of these devices are cuff-based that are worn on the arm or wrist, and store patient

data on their local memory over a period of time. The patient then takes the device back

to his physician who downloads the data from the device for analysis. Such systems,

although extremely useful and necessary, suffer from lack of real-time monitoring.

The design of this project comprises of hardware components such as blood pressure

sensor, Bluetooth serial communication circuit, sensor node for base station interfaces

and softwares programmed in two languages, Arduino for the microcontroller section and

Android for the Patient Monitor app.

The designed system addresses situations such as routing data in real-time from a patient's

sick bed to a personal digital assistant (PDA) where the data can be accessed by the

physician without any time lag. In this case, any dangerous situation can be avoided

because the technology will generate a notification to alert the physician rather than

requiring the patient to inform his physician of the situation. Bluetooth communication

can be used to design a robust mesh network that routes patient data to a remote base

station, a hospital care giver can have access to this data at any point in time and doesn't have to be physically present in the patient's room to review the readings.