Prototype Development of an IoT Health Monitoring Device for Elderly Patient

Abstract

In hospitals or elderly care centres, nurses and physicians routinely round on each patient to review the their recovery progress and plan the patient's care for the day. However, frequent rounds throughout the day are challenging, especially when the medical team is understaffed to care for a large number of inpatients. In addition, manual recording on a sheet of paper may result in delayed data filing in the individual patient file, inadequate records storage spaces and delayed searching of patient records. Such inconveniences would prevent the medical team from focusing their full attention on critical and high-need patients. To avoid delays in emergency or appropriate medical treatment, this paper aims to develop an IoT-based monitoring device for elderly patients who may experience sudden abnormalities in heartbeat rate and blood oxygen saturation (i.e., SpO2) level. By selecting the dual-parameter measurement electronic module such as MAX30102 and free firmware, this wearable prototype is developed at low cost while ensuring that it can provide patient location information in a user-friendly mobile application when an abnormal patient condition is detected. The functionality of the proposed system was tested on 15 elderly individuals. It was found that the prototype is able to measure and detect their health parameters successfully. Therefore, it is expected that the proposed solution could be useful for the medical health sector.