A Holistic Tool for Developing a Wireless Home-Based Health Monitoring System

Early detection and diagnosis of potentially fatal physiological conditions such as heart attacks, require continuous monitoring of patient health following transfer from hospital to home. In response to this need, wireless home-based health monitoring systems (WHMS) are being proposed as a low-cost solution. A WHMS (Figure 1) consists of physiological sensors that store, process, and communicate physiological data through a wireless communication network to a local manager (LM) such as a smartphone, which in turn uses cloud services for diagnosis. Such WHMS should satisfy strict safety, security, reliability, and long-term real-time operation requirements, as mandated by regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and by policies such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Development of a WHMS that satisfies these requirements is a challenging task, and several tools have been proposed for this purpose. However, such tools are often lacking in several aspects of the WHMS life cycle, including design, development, and maintenance. The principal challenge in developing a holistic, wireless, home-based health monitoring tool comes from its potential diverse set of users. A WHMS life-cycle management tool should be usable by the following set of users each having their own needs and knowledge base: a) Physicians have expert knowledge on diagnosis of a patient using WHMS. In this regard, they might need monitoring and display of physiological signals, usage of signal processing algorithms for diagnosis, and storage of medical records. However, we do not expect them to have knowledge of intricate engineering processes in a WHMS, such as architectural details of sensor hardware and programming languages. b) Developers possess the required technical skills to implement WHMS hardware and software. They need to perform platform A Holistic Tool for Developing a Wireless Home-Based Health Monitoring System