Multi-functional Health Monitoring System

Based on the statistics of previous years, a major reason for death occurring in patients being cared for at home and residential assisted living facilities is accidental, often resulting from negligence of the relatives or caregivers and resulting in harm to already fragile human beings. As populations continue to age and the birth rate shrinks, the number of chronic patients is expected grow, a rapidly increase in need for drugs for the chronically ill will occur, as well as the increase in accidents related to future lack of the human resources to monitor and care for these patients and resulting in an increase in accidental deaths. These future problems will be worsened if we do not update the current health monitoring system, which is operated manually, which makes use of expensive equipment, and which is performed quite slowly. Given the increases in the chronically ill ages, it is likely in the future that dozens of elderly people will just have one caregiver among them.. Hence, this paper proposes a multifunctional health monitoring system to provide better and safer monitoring than traditional human care. The system includes such hardware as RFID devices to monitor hand temperature, ambient temperature and humidity, a blood pressure and pulse detector to monitor blood pressure and pulse, and a webcam to monitor human expression and age. All information collected by such sensors can be integrated and processed with an embedded system. Using a rule-based decision method, such a system should be able to evaluate a patient's state of health. Should the system detect an unstable status, it can send warning messages to related staff caretakers who could then take the necessary actions to care for the patient in distress in a timely manner. This system would save patient-to-patient monitoring time and allow caretakers to provide immediate care to those in more urgent need of it. Our tests of this proposed system suggest that that it is possible to set up a complete health monitoring system by combining this embedded system and system-alerted health-care service.