Imran Shafi, Sadia Din, Siddique Farooq,I sabel de la Torre Díez, Jose Breñosa, Julio César Martínez Espinosa, Imran Ashraf
Abstract
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, social isolation and quarantine have become commonplace across the world. IoT health monitoring solutions eliminate the need for regular doctor visits and interactions among patients and medical personnel. Many patients in wards or intensive care units require continuous monitoring of their health. Continuous patient monitoring is a hectic practice in hospitals with limited staff; in a pandemic situation like COVID-19, it becomes much more difficult practice when hospitals are working at full capacity and there is still a risk of medical workers being infected. In this study, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT)-based patient health monitoring system that collects real-time data on important health indicators such as pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation, and body temperature but can be expanded to include more parameters.
Introduction
Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as things having identities and virtual personalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate within social, environmental, and user contexts. It can be considered the future of the Internet, where every object is connected to other objects. The network assigns each thing a distinct identification. This enables devices to be accessed remotely via the network at any time and from anywhere. Smart, pervasive, and always-connected environments are created by IoT-equipped things communicating with one another, accessing information through the Internet, and interacting with users.
Literature Review
With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, social isolation and quarantine have become prevalent worldwide. IoT health monitoring solutions eliminate the need for regular medical appointments and interactions among patients and medical personnel. Even though, many people require medical experts to examine and observe their health on a frequent basis. IoT-based smart health monitoring system [7] is proposed to address these issues, proficient in measuring patient’s temperature, heart rate, and oxygen saturation. If any abnormal values do not meet the standard values an alert is generated and sent to the concerned medical staff.
Proposed Methodology
The working for projects is divided into two parts. The first part surrounds the interfacing of sensors being used in the system. Testing and implementing these hardware components with a microcontroller acting as the base processor to process all inputs. The second part then deals with storing, displaying, and notifying the data coming from the sensors. Cloud-based services offer a significant benefit in this IoT process.
Results and Discussions
After initializing controller and sensors are mounted on the Patient’s Wrist and finger. To get a visual representation of data it takes a few seconds to get the stable value from the sensors to be displayed after the controller is initialized.
Conclusion
This study presents an intelligent health monitoring system that makes it simple for doctors to examine patients’ vitals on a smartphone or a computer at their office without personally visiting them. Aside from the doctor, the patient is constantly monitored by an intelligent system, and if vitals are above or below the normal range, an alert is generated and broadcast to the concerned medical staff and the patient’s caregiver. Data is continually uploaded to the cloud, and if the connection to the cloud is interrupted for any reason, data is temporarily kept on an SD card and uploaded to the cloud the instant the connection is restored. Real-time data is displayed on the feed and is available to medical staff and can be shared with the Patient’s caretaker as well. No one can view feed other than concerned persons or persons to whom feed is shared.
Citation: Shafi I, Din S, Farooq S, Díez IdlT, Breñosa J, Espinosa JCM, et al. (2024) Design and development of patient health tracking, monitoring and big data storage using Internet of Things and real time cloud computing. PLoS ONE 19(3): e0298582. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0298582
Editor: Md. Milon Islam, KUET: Khulna University of Engineering and Technology, BANGLADESH
Received: December 18, 2022; Accepted: January 28, 2024; Published: March 11, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Shafi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the manuscript.
Funding: This research was supported by the European University of the Atlantic. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
