Health Monitoring System Using MSP 430
Sneha Makkitaya · IOSR Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering · 2013
Telemedicine is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance.It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities.It is also used to save lives in critical care and emergency situations.Telemedicine allows remote diagnoses and monitoring of patients [1].It guarantees agility, safety, and reliability in modern health-care institutions.There are several challenges associated to automation in this sort of environment [2], viz: heterogeneity of devices, protocols, and programming interfaces; the requirement for flexible, impact-free deployment; the requirement for easy to configure, easy to manage, scalable and, if possible, self-adjusting systems, and others.We focus on the problem of patients' vital data collection, distribution, and processing.We suggest that current solutions based on manual note taking are slow, time consuming, and labor resource intensive.Besides, it imposes an obstacle to real-time data access that curbs the ability of clinical diagnostics and monitoring.We present a solution to automate this process from bedside data collection to information distribution and remote access by medical staff.Our solution is based on concepts of wireless sensor networks and utility computing."Sensors" are attached to existing medical equipments that are inter-connected to exchange services; these are integrated to the institution's computing network infrastructure.The information becomes available in the "cloud", from where it can be processed by expert systems and/or distributed to medical staff for analysis.We argue that these technologies provide desirable features for automation in telemedicine environment addressing the challenges listed above.Our contribution is two-folded in social and scientific fields.In social we demonstrate an innovative and low cost solution to improve the quality of medical assistance delivery and; in scientific field we address the challenges of how to integrate sensors connected to legacy medical devices which cloud computing services to collect, process and delivery patient's vital data.