IOT based Patient Vitals Monitoring System

Abstract

We have been implementing the internet of things (IoT) in our daily lives everywhere like smart parking, smart home, smart city, smart agriculture, and many more. Healthcare has also been using IoT during the past decade [1-4]. Especially during the pandemic, IOT healthcare monitoring proves to be quite useful. In this COVID pandemic, more patients are getting admitted to the hospitals for treatment. The patients at the hospital also include many non-COVID patients. Monitoring every patient is a tedious task for the staff because hospitals have limited staff considering both COVID and non-COVID wards. Apart from these, elderly and bedridden patients need to be monitored regularly. Elderly patients are facing a problematic situation of unforeseen demise due to heart problems. These attacks are mainly because of the nonexistence of immediate and good medical treatment at the time of need. Also, in India during the 2nd wave, there were many deaths because of the oxygen supply not being given to patients at the right time. To provide an overall solution for the health care system, we are proposing an innovative solution to monitor the patient without actually needing any medical help from the staff and avoiding any unwanted situation for the patient by the Smart Patient Vital Monitoring system (Figure 1). This system includes sensor technology backed by the internet to help doctors and relatives of the patient to monitor the health condition of the patient. This is mainly for monitoring bedridden or quarantined patients. This system uses four sensors to get the data from the hospital environment as well as the patient. These include an ECG sensor to check the heart condition, a DSB18B20 temperature sensor to check the body temperature of the patient, a pulse sensor to check the oxygen level of the patient, a DHT11 sensor to monitor the room temperature and humidity of the room. These sensors are connected to the Arduino UNO. This system is interfaced with a liquid crystal display (LCD) to provide sensor readings as output. The setup is connected to a wi-fi module to communicate the condition of the patient to the hospital staff and the guardian of the patient so that they can process and analyze the current situation of the patient and can get to know immediately if there is any risk to the patient. This system can be used flexibly; it can not only be used in hospitals but can also be used by quarantined patients. Previously proposed health monitoring systems have included and concentrated on temperature, pulse rate, and oxygen level. Now we have also extended this system such that it can be useful to monitor elderly patients, bedridden patients, and heart patients by measuring heart rate with an additional ECG sensor. Thus, in this context sudden heart attack-related deaths could also be avoided to a greater extent. The graphs obtained from the output of sensors can be seen via the Things Speak platform wherein doctors can monitor the ECG readings along with the pulse rate in a graphical form. This makes the process of patient monitoring easy and affordable as well. This solution proposed is only a smaller scale but can be extended with the use of advanced sensors and proper advancements in the system