Wearable IoT enabled real-time health monitoring system

Abstract

As the age profile of many societies continues to increase, in addition to the increasing population of people affected by chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and so on, supporting health, both mentally and physically, is of increasing importance if independent living is to be maintained. Sensing, remote health monitoring, and, ultimately, recognising activities of daily living have been an promising solution. From a technical perspective, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining a rapidly growing attention in many disciplines, especially in personalised healthcare. Meanwhile, body area sensor network (BASN) under the IoT framework has been widely applied for ubiquitous health monitoring, for example. ECG monitoring has been commonly adopted as vital approach for diagnosing heart disease. The main contribution of this paper include the following: firstly, this paper presents a novel system, the WISE (Wearable IoT-cloud-baSed hEalth monitoring system), for real-time personal health monitoring. WISE adopts the BASN (body area sensor network) framework in the support of real-time health monitoring. Several wearable sensors have been embedded, including the heartbeat, body temperature, and the blood pressure sensors. Secondly, the majority of existing wearable health monitoring systems requisite a smart phone as data processing, visualisation, and transmission gateway, which will indeed impact the normal daily use of the smart phone. Whilst in WISE, data gathered from the BASN are directly transmitted to the cloud, and a lightweight wearable LCD can be embedded as an alternative solution for quick view of the real-time data.