Affordable Health Monitoring
As an engineering student in a least-developed country, our curriculum had an implicit focus on solving challenges for underprivileged communities or resource-constrained regions. When I came across an idea contest to develop innovative solutions addressing such problems I decided to take on this project.
Bangladesh currently faces the challenge of delivering standardized healthcare services in rural areas. Primary and secondary health complexes regularly deal with a lack of basic medical resources and medical staff. There are also issues such as poor road communication and transport services, and inadequate response to accidents and emergency patients adding to the existing problem.
For this project, I wanted to combine low-cost sensors that could reliably read patient vitals under one system. Real-time patient monitoring measures, among many, critical physiologic parameters such as:
- Heart rate
- Oxygen Concentration
- Blood pressure
- Body temperature
I outlined a plan to record these sensor readings from a patient and visualize them using a Raspberry Pi.
For this project, I wanted to combine low-cost sensors that could reliably read patient vitals under one system. Real-time patient monitoring measures, among many, critical physiologic parameters such as:
- Heart rate
- Oxygen Concentration
- Blood pressure
- Body temperature
I outlined a plan to record these sensor readings from a patient and visualize them using a Raspberry Pi.
Will this work?:
I presented the plan on how to construct this affordable system and implement them across rural health facilities in our country. Using the data from accessible medical infrastructure records, I also wanted to show its viability to adapt to IoT solutions in the field of telemedicine. This presentation won me the Digital Bangladesh Award – a challenge for university students across the country to develop innovative ideas.
Winning the Digital Bangladesh Award
Read More
Testing with ECG:
I may have won the idea presentation, but I still needed to prove how this plan could be executed. So, with just enough budget for a small demo, I set up the AD8232 ECG1 sensor using an Arduino Uno. The following is the result after I hooked up the electrodes to myself:
Introducing this project to IoT:
Given how the sensor readings were reliable, I wanted to take it one step further by making the data accessible from any platform. Since I did not have the resources for availing a Raspberry Pi and the other sensors, I used the ECG sensor with a NodeMCU ESP8266 development board for this demonstration. ESP8266 microcontroller operates on the NodeMCU open-source firmware that is used for IoT projects and comes with a WiFi module. Configuring the device with my network, I was able to send the ECG data over to my Ubidots dashboard (an IoT platform).
I repurposed an adjustable abdominal belt to hold the microcontroller and sensor so that the patient can move around with the electrodes. As soon as the device turned on, the data was received by the Ubidots cloud and visualized as a graph in my dashboard. The only drawback was there was a slight delay in this entire process.
Testing out the device and receiving data in the IoT platform of Ubidots.
To see the real-time graph, please view in full screen.
(thank you dad for being the test patient in this demo)
Final thoughts:
Even though this was only a small implementation of a large-scale idea, I was very inspired throughout this process to work with human-centered technology. Getting to research and learn about healthcare conditions, patients and biomedical technology was an incredible experience for me. I hope to one day do more of these contextual studies, research reliable and affordable technology, and design products that can help communities.
1 Resource on AD8232 ECG sensor module and how to use it:
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/ad8232-heart-rate-monitor-hookup-guide/all
2 To know more about the NodeMCU ESP development boards: