A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the Master of Science
Degree in Data Communication in KCA University
2016
Health care provision remains a big challenge both in developing and developed countries. With increasing life expectancy a much larger percentage of the population will be dependent on others for their daily care in years to come. Lifestyle diseases are on the rise, with higher prevalence of diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity and Hypertension, among many others. Extreme cases that need close observation can be done within the hospital setup other cases can be monitored remotely.
High cost medical provision is being experienced in both developing and developing countries, where total global health spending is expected to rise by an average of 5.3 percent a year by 2017. Most of the patients especially in poor countries result to an out-of-pocket expenditures on health.
Research has shown that ratio of physicians to people is 14:1,000 globally and 2.3:1,000 in Africa. The European Commission also points out that there will be a shortage of 230,000 physicians across the continent in the near future.
It is therefore necessary to work out alternative ways of monitoring patients without necessarily confining them in a hospital environment, hence the need for remote health monitoring systems and devices to reduce the workload on the already overloaded workforce in the health sectors. Advancement in sensor technologies, modes of communication and data transmission, data analytics systems and software are a key to success of such systems. For efficiency and reliability of transmissions different modes has to be included to avoid cases of data loss.
The Arduino based remote health monitoring system presented in this research dissertation allows remote transmission of physiological data to the health care givers. The device transmits via three modes, that is, Bluetooth, GSM-SMS and WIFI.
The device enables data to be accessed by the patient and the doctor, and sends alert message to emergency operators in case the threshold values are exceeded.
