System Architecture and Implementation of a Wireless-Based Home Health Care Monitoring System Intended for Use in a Medical Center Environment

We describe an end-to-end wireless and/or wireline approach to a continuous health care monitoring and alerting system for individual free-living patients in their homes, intended for use as a clinical tool set by medical professionals based in medical center or hospital environment. The system begins with the patient being monitored in his/her private home, who wears a small physiological monitoring, recording, and wireless transmission unit. This body-worn unit communicates wirelessly with a transceiver gateway positioned at a convenient location in the home. The gateway in turn reformats the received data into conventional Ethernet packets, which can then be transmitted across any channel capable of transporting such packets. The data packets traverse any of four separate wireless or wired channels to a medical center, where they are fed into a graphical user interface for viewing and appropriate clinical decision-making by medical professionals. All of the elements of this proposed system have been demonstrated with actual hardware and software over the past four years.