The vital signs play an important role in the daily routine of medical check-up in the hospital. The basic routine is called vital signs check with consists of 5 main elements which are body temperature, pulse rate, respiration rate, blood pressure and pain score. Usually, these vital sign readings are recorded by nurses or carers. They will do the routine check daily depend on the criticality of patient’s condition that needs to be monitored. The more critical, the more frequent reading is recorded. Typically, the nurses must record the vital sign reading for each patient once for 4 – 6 hours.
Nurses are divided into a cubicle, where the ratio of nurses and patients sometimes reaching a value of 1:10 or even 1:20. Make thing worst, the nurses are working in shift. During a changing of the shift, it is very important the documents are kept and pass to the next nurses on duty. If the information or documents were interpreted wrongly, normally case such medication error could happen. Because of this, the project aims to develop a vital sign monitoring system based on IoT, The objective is to reduce the nurse’s load of work besides helping in improving the efficiency of measuring the vital signs reading.
This system consists of wearable devices, FAVORIOT platform, mobile apps or website as shown in Figure 2. The wearable device is attached to the sensor to measures three type of vital signs which are pulse rate, body temperature, and respiration rate. Arduino UNO is selected as the microcontroller. Each patient must wear this wearable device, which is really comfortable and convenient where the patient can move freely around in the hospital rather than just lying on his or her bed. This will release some tension to the patient being warded in the hospital for a long period of time and reduce the possibility of high blood pressure to occur. The wearable device can also be used on children, which they can play around in the hospital at the same time can be monitored.
The vital sign readings will be pushed to the FAVORIOT platform. In order to allow this, ESP 8266 (Wifi shield) will be used to establish a connection to the Internet. The collected data at the FAVORIOT will be viewed on a developed website and mobile apps. In any emergency cases such as patients may suddenly lose their pulse, breathing rate and temperature rises, the system will alert and notify the nurses as soon as possible
[NOTE: This project is being done by UTHM, our FAVORIOT’s University’s collaborator. Name: Nor Izzudin Bin Nor Ariffin and Supervisor: Dr. Ansar bin Jamil]