Body Sensor Networks in Fetal Monitoring with NFC Enabled Android Devices

Abstract

As many areas of the medical field are becoming more and more interested in telemedicine and outpatient care, we focused on obstetrics and the monitoring of fetal health as an area of medicine that could benefit greatly from body sensor network (BSN) technology. In this paper, we explore some of the hardware sensor interface challenges involved with condensing the fetal monitoring procedure into a portable system, specifically for a system integration with a smartphone. There are two contributions of our hardware interface with an Android-based smartphone: i) using IOIO hardware board to prototype an universal interface to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hospital-graded medical devices, ii) using Google's Near Field Communication (NFC) Android devices for initiating our monitoring mobile application and secure interface hardware devices and a backend hospital information system (HIS). We demonstrated this prototype that could integrate with current existing medical monitoring devices and capture BSN information in a seamless manner without cumbersome initialization processes. Also, it reduced the risk that applications can accidentally be initialized and corrupted HIS unintentionally. As a result, the system can be potentially used by a remote monitoring setup without a presence of a medical profession, and even streamline in-patient monitoring process with actual precision for the medical measurements.

Diagnostic Systems for Pregnancy Healthcare through Telemedicine Networking

“…Some examples of portable sensors for telemedicine have been introduced in the literature. For instance, the cardiotocograph by Korostelev et al 15 . connects a pressure sensor and an ultrasonic sensor to portable devices using the Android operating system.…”

“…Some examples of portable sensors for telemedicine have been introduced in the literature. For instance, the cardiotocograph by Korostelev et al 15 connects a pressure sensor and an ultrasonic sensor to portable devices using the Android operating system. A system developed by Boeing et al 16 for pregnancy monitoring detects the fetal heart sound with the principle of the stethoscope, in which the sound waves coming from the patient's body are captured by a microphone and used to interpret the heartbeat of the fetus.…”

Near-Field Communication Sensors

“…These NFC sensors have been widely used in healthcare. As is shown in the Figure 1, NFC sensors have many other applications in continuous monitoring of food safety and plant growth, which shows great potential in commercial fields [15,16]. For example, in wearable devices, biochemical NFC sensors detecting biofluids (e.g., sweat, tears, and saliva) provide electronics with new functions in portable, real-time monitoring, non-invasive detection, and quantification [17,18,19,20].…”

Wearable Electronics Sensors: Current Status and Future Opportunities

“…Alzheimer patients, as well as other medication monitoring, are well monitored with NFC technology. Smartphones [136], security [137] gaming and other common applications [138][139][140][141][142][143] are the reasons of popularity NFC. The communication between smartphones takes place with tags attached to it.…”