Low-cost, Long Term Distributed Patient Research Platform
Dirk Jäger · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 2008
The group intends to develop a Long-term Patient Monitoring Research Platform to support and assist health-care providers. The Research platform, which does not intend to rely on a central server or a continuously connected Internet connection, aims to act as a low-cost support tool to aid health-care providers of the future. In 2005, The World Health Organisation stated that 60 % of worldwide mortality is due to chronic disease [1], while 80 % of chronic diseases occur in low and middle income countries. Chronic disease, along with a global aging population, a population that is becoming obese [2], and worldwide pandemics (such as HIV/AIDS) combined with high-in-demand healthcare providers[3] and increased costs of healthcare [4], paint a disastrous picture for the future of healthcare. The research platform is therefore intended to not rely on a central server, but rather on a distributed intelligent network of the sensor nodes. By investigating modern parallel processing techniques [6] and distributed algorithms for data fusion (such as [7]), along with novel, low-cost sensors for physiological measurements, the research platform will be compared against traditional methods of centralised servers and the client-server model. The research platform's initial investigations will involve attempting to find patterns in signals for diagnosis and quickly identifying emergency events during long-term monitoring. For further information, please visit