IoT-Based Ambulatory Vital Signs Data Transfer System

Abstract

In emergencies or life-threatening situations, patients are generally shifted to hospitals in ambulances. The health conditions of on-board patients can become critical if they are not evaluated and treated in time. Chances of saving lives can increase significantly if patients’ vital signs inside an ambulance or on-site triage area are transferred to a hospital in real time. If the ambulances are linked to target hospitals, then the physicians in emergency rooms can monitor on-board patients’ vital signs and issue instructions to paramedics to stabilize patients’ medical conditions before they reach the assigned hospitals. Transferred vital signs data may also be archived for medical records. The Internet of things (IoT) is a paradigm which envisions Internet connectivity of virtually everything on the earth. In this paper, an IoT-based low-cost solution is proposed to monitor, archive, analyze, and tag the vital signs data of multiple patients and transfer them to the remote hospital in real time. This opens up a lot of possibilities in telemedicine and disaster management. As a proof of concept, the functionality of the proposed system was validated by developing a prototype model utilizing an IoT-enabled medical sensor board and a Linux server mimicking the remote hospital server. Results of actual data transmission obtained during experimentation are also provided. It is hoped that the proposed system can play a role in saving human lives in disaster situations.

Development of a Modified Medical Data Transmission over the Cellular Network System to Secure Health-Related Data from Changes in Environmental Parameters

“…Using the previously presented Medical Data Transmission over the Cellular Network (MEDTOC) [1] method, the delay in the first visit with doctors can be greatly reduced. Similarly, the vital signs of many patients in the MEDTOC system can be combined, optionally reduced, and sent over the cellular network to local hospitals for patient monitoring.…”

Applicability of Distributed IoT-powered Triage Units in the Management of Infectious Diseases in Developing Countries: The COVID-19 case

“…Existing IoT-based medical data transfer transmission was compared with the cellular network with regards to its efficacy in the medical triage system in [19]. The implementation of cellular based communication is more efficient because of its support for large emerging IoT applications according to [20].…”

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“…The app transports the data to a server located in a cloud or to a corporate data centre. Misbahuddin et al (2018) proposed a patient monitoring system in which the patient's vital signs (e.g) ECG, temperature, etc., are measured using the wearable sensors.…”