A Smart, Low Cost, Wearable Technology for Remote Patient Monitoring

Accurate measurement and timely communication of vital signs is critical to determine health status of patients in the hospital. Absence of reliable vital signs values or delay in their communication leads to medical errors which often result in life threatening situation. This is caused mainly by the manual nature of current monitoring practices and large patient to nurse ratio in under-resourced clinical settings. The neonatology department faces major issues in this regard as ill and/or premature new-born infants require constant monitoring to avoid any subsequent adverse event. To address this issue, an affordable and automated system to continuously measure three important vital signs; temperature, pulse rate, and pulse oxygen concentration using microelectronics and Internet of things is presented here. The system measures the vital signs using wearable sensors and communicates the data wirelessly with maximum error of 0.1 degrees C temperature, 0.6 % oxygen saturation, and 0.8 beats per minute(BPM) in pulse rate. It also automatically alarms to indicate life-threatening conditions based upon the values of these vital signs. The overall system costs only 7000 PKR (45 USD) and it can be reused across patients due to its wearable nature. It is a compact, smart and easy to handle system having approximate weight and dimensions of 50g and 190 x 85 x 20 mm respectively. The results presented here will enable widespread adoption of the system

Automated summary

Accurate measurement and timely communication of vital signs are crucial for determining patient health status in hospitals, but manual monitoring practices and resource scarcity contribute to medical errors. An affordable and automated system utilizing microelectronics and the Internet of things can continuously measure vital signs and automatically alert for life-threatening conditions, improving monitoring efficiency.