Proceedings of the 2017 4th International Conference on Advances in Electrical Engineering (ICAEE)

28-30 September, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Real Time Patient Monitoring System based on

Internet of Things
Mohammad Salah Uddin Jannat Binta Alam1, and Suraiya Banu2
Department of Computer Control and Management Engineering “A. Ruberti” Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
[email protected] {jannat1ruma 1, suraiya.lata2}@gmail.com

Abstract— The popularity of Internet of Things is increasing

day by day in the area of remote monitoring system. The remote
monitoring systems include, vehicle or assets monitoring, kids/pets
monitoring, fleet management, parking management, water and
oil leakage, energy grid monitoring etc. In this paper, we have
proposed an intelligent patient monitoring system for monitoring
the patients’ health condition automatically through sensors based
connected networks. Several sensors are used for gathering the
biological behaviors of a patient. The meaningful biological
information are then forwarded to the IoT cloud. The system is
more intelligent that can able to detect the critical condition of a
patient by processing sensors data and instantly provides push
notification to doctors/nurses as well as hospital in-charge
personal. The doctors and nurses get benefited from this system
by observing their corresponding patients remotely without
visiting in person. Patients’ relatives can also get benefited from Fig. 1: A Typical ICU unit [1].
this system with limited access.

Keywords— Intensive Care Unit, Real time patient monitoring, related to Radio-frequency identification (RFID) in 1999. The
Health monitoring system, Intensive care, IoT device, Sensors, service composition is fully supported by IoT with various
Mobile apps, sensors networks. applications. The communication among millions of devices
(any type of internet connected) are possible through IoT. The
I. INTRODUCTION Three Layer Architecture (most popular) is illustrated in Fig. 2.
The layers are: Perception, Network and Application Layer.
A. Intensive Care Unit Sensors, Actuators, Proximity tags (RFID, NFC etc.) and other
embedded devices such as microcontrollers/microprocessors are
The similar name of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is Critical
connected to the IoT system via Perception layer. Network
Care Unit (CCU). It is also familiar with some others name such
layer establish the communications between Things and users
as intensive treatment unit. ICU is a distinct sector of a
(human or consumers). User interfaces/applications are
clinic/hospital that delivers rigorous treatment. Not all the
demanded by Application layer. More details specifications and
patients need intensive care. Medical scientist categorized them
applications domain of Internet of Things (IoT) are nicely
(patients) who needs special treatment. Such categories include:
elaborated in [2–6].
x If the physiological regulatory systems of a patients are Terms and Basic Definitions:
not stable because of drug overdose.
x Internet of Things (IoT): A network of Internet
x Patients with Cardiovascular or organ failure disease. connected devices (electrical) able to interchange data
x After critical surgery such as open-heart surgery, single between them using sensors and actuators.
or multiple organ replacement etc. Those patients are x IoT device: Any type of electrical Internet connected
directly transfer to the ICU unit. device/s that can be monitored and/or controlled
x If a patient suffering malfunction in several organs such through Internet from anywhere(remote location).
as trauma or septic shock. x IoT ecosystem: All the components that enable
x Mother and baby throughout the childbirth process. consumers, governments and businesses to connect
with their IoT devices, including remotes, networks,
B. Internet of Things dashboards, gateways, storage, analytics and security.
The Internet of Things is the connected network between x Entity: Mainly includes the users of IoT system such
devices (wearable, portable and house-held devices etc.), which as consumers, governments and businesses etc.
was first proposed by Prof. Aston while performing the research

978-1-5386-0869-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 516

 x The Physical layer: The physical components almost all the European countries are using similar type of
(hardware) that makes an Internet of Things (IoT) tracking system for public transportation.
device which includes sensors, actuators and
Rohit in [8] proposed a smart home with real time e metering
networking gear.
system based on IoT for building the automated intelligent
x The Network layer: The main duty of network layer home. The system reduces the power consumption by remotely
is transmitting the data collected from physical layer to controlled the electrical equipment. Another IoT based energy
IoT devices. efficient smart home concept has presented by Laila in [9],
where the different type of sensors are used for controlling the
x The Application layer: All the protocols and electronic equipment.
interfaces used by the connected devices for
identification and communication. Water pollution detection system is very useful for pollution
management. A real-time water monitoring system is discussed
x Dashboard: The dashboard is used for visualizing the in [10]. The system consists of several sensors such as pH level,
information about the Internet of Things ecosystem. It humidity/temperature etc. Sensors data are directly transmitted
also used for controlling the IoT ecosystem. It acts as a to the base station for monitoring the pollution level of water.
special type of remote control for IoT. The experimental setup was took place in lake Toba, Indonesia.
x Analytics: Software systems that analyze the data IoT is also popular in health care field. Nowadays, various
generated by IoT connected devices. The analysis can health monitoring devices are getting wearable/portable,
be used for a different purposes, such as predictive including body temperature monitors, glucose monitors, ECG
maintenance. monitors, pulse oximeters, and blood pressure monitoring
system are described in [11–19]. A prototype of ICU monitoring
x Storage for IoT: The cloud storage/data bucket, where
application was introduced in [20] without satisfactory details.
data from IoT devices are stored temporary or
A hardware design for monitoring patient through embedded
permanently.
computer raspberry pi was shown in [21] without use of the
x The Networks: The Internet communication layer proper sensors and cloud connectivity left for future work.
that enables the entity to communicate with their Another solution was proposed in [22-23], without following
embedded devices, and enables devices to proper IoT structure. Human fall detection system is very
communicate with each other. helpful for monitoring the older people who lives in alone. A
prototype fall detection system based in Internet of Things is
presented in [24-25].

Fig. 2: Architecture of Internet of things (most popular).

II. STATE OF THE ART

The popularity of Internet of Things are increasing day by Fig. 3: The block diagram of proposed patient monitoring system.
day in the area of remote monitoring system. The remote
monitoring systems include, vehicle or assets monitoring, III. PROPOSED SYSTEM
kids/pets monitoring, fleet management, parking management, We have used an Arduino 101 (IoT development board) as
water and oil leakage, energy grid monitoring etc. a principle controller of our proposed monitoring system. The
details technical specifications of Arduino 101 development
A fixed route, simple bus tracking system has been proposed
board are listed in (see [34]). The Arduino board collected the
by Lau in [7]. The system used a smartphone application and
information about patient health parameter from various sensors
LED display panel for displaying the location after a specific
(described in Table-I), which were directly connected with
time interval. The system is very useful for college/university
principle controller. The thinger.io [35] IoT cloud platform is
students who attend classes in big campuses. As a result, they
used as a IoT cloud for our proposed system. The emergency
(students) can spend more time in studying, sleeping or relaxing
condition of a patient is determined through the simple
rather than wasting time through waiting for a bus. Nowadays,
mathematical Equation-I, where the details mathematical
notation about threshold level is elaborated in Table-II.

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 Figure 4: Hardware design of the system.

TABLE 1: HARDWARE COMPONENT LIST

Name of the components Purpose

Arduino/Genuino 101 The main controller board
Arduino Ethernet Shield [26] Connection bridge between cloud and controller
Temperature and Humidity sensor [27] For body temperature and humidity measurement
Heart rate sensor (MAX30100 [28]) Measure the pulse
ECG sensor [29] Measure the ECG data
Buzzer [30] Emergency Alarm
LED Emergency indicator
Push button [31] call for assistance
Movement sensor [32] Detect the unexpected movement
Blood pressure sensor [33] Measure the blood pressure
360 Camera, Optional Optionally streams the video
Others sensors Air quality sensor and room temperature sensor
are used for measuring room environment
12volt DC power supply Power source

TABLE 2: MATHEMATICAL NOTATION OF SENSORS READINGS

Sensor (notation) Threshold Threshold level [1]

Heart rate, hr Theartrate less than 50 and greater than 120
Temperature, tempbody Ttemperature less than 35 and greater than 39 in Celsius
Humidity, humiditybody Thumidity less than 40% and greater than 55%
Movements, movebody Tmovements Unexpected
SPO2, spo2blood TSPO2 Under 90 %
Upper blood pressure, upperblood Tupperblood less than 120 and greater than180
Lower blood pressure, lowerblood Tlowerblood less than 80 and greater than 110
Push button, buttoncall Tbutton On
ECG, ecgheart TECG N/A

Ttemperature ˅ Thumidity ˅ Theartrate ˅ Tmovement ˅ TSPO2 ˅ Tupperblood ˅ Tlowerblood ˅ Tbutton ………………………… (1)

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 Fig. 6: The Mobile Application with Normal and Emergency condition.

Fig. 5: Mobile application of patient monitoring system for doctors and nurses.
The device continuously streams the sensors data to the IoT cloud and the
application is directly connected to the cloud and visualize the real time using
different type of charts.

A. Software and Apps

We have developed a Mobile application (shown in Fig.5
and Fig.6). Various charts and gauges have used for displaying
the real-time sensors data, which contains present health
parameters (present health condition) of a patient. Through this
application, doctors or nurses can monitor their patients
remotely without visiting the ICU unit. Due to the nature of
intelligence, the system sent the push notification to
corresponding doctors or nurses about the emergency situation Fig. 7: The Desktop application for monitoring the patient.
of the patient, where the Equation -I determines the emergency
condition of a patient by processing the sensors data. The V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLAN
hospital-in charge personal (ICU in-charge person) also Many patients died in ICU unit due to the careless of in-
constantly monitored more than one patient at a time through charge personal. In traditional system is not able to provides
our web based cloud connected desktop application (shown in constant monitoring facilities. Our proposed system described in
Figure-7), which improves the efficiency of ICU unit. All the this paper allows doctors or nurses, as well as hospital in-charge
application were connected to the IoT cloud and visualized the personal allows them to monitor the patient in ICU unit in real
real-time data using different type of charts such gauge, spark- time, which improves the efficiency and service quality. There
line, Text etc. is a huge opportunity to modify this system as a wearable device,
that allows us to monitor the older people or babies remotely
IV. SYSTEM TESTING from any place.
We used some existing medical devices listed in Fig.10, that
are available in the market for measuring health parameter of a
person. The Blood Pressure monitor device is already medically
certified and the validation of this device is available in [36].
Others sensors such as Humidity and ECG are not tested since
we do not have enough medical device support. Detecting the
patient body movements is an important task. In this regard,
Computer Vision based human body movement system is more
accurate than measuring the body movements using low cost
sensors like (accelerometers). On the other hand, integration of
vison based system with low cost microcontroller is more
complex than sensors based system. A sensors (accelerometers)
based human body movements measurement system is
described in [37], which can be easily integrable with our
proposed system. Fig. 8: Blood Oxygen -Level(SPO2) measurement data.

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