An IoT- Assisted Patient Monitoring and Alert System

Abstract

In today's fast-growing technology world, efforts are being made to bring innovation in various areas to make human life easier. One important focus is improving medical services for people who don't have easy access to health care, especially in remote areas. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), forty-one million people die across the globe annually due to chronic diseases which is equivalent to 74% of deaths worldwide. It is a critical issue that needs to be addressed across the globe by providing easy-to-access and cost-effective real-time healthcare solutions.  The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an emerging trend to provide effective and smart healthcare services to patients.  The goal of this study is to develop an IoT-assisted Patient Monitoring and Alert System (PMAS) to remotely monitor the patient’s health and intimate the caregiver about their health status. The novelty of the proposed approach is to gauge vital parameters such as heart rate, body temperature, and oxygen level of a patient remotely and keep their caregivers informed in case of emergency. Therefore, it becomes possible for caregivers to make necessary decisions according to the patient’s health status. The proposed study has two main parts, in the first part, sensors are used to measure important information about a patient’s health, and in the second part, transmitting gauged data to a doctor or caregiver who can monitor a patient's health progress even from far away, outside of hospitals. After collecting data, analysis of data is per-formed in Python using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms for the classification of health status. The patient’s health status is classified into three classes based on collected data i.e., Good, Satisfactory, and Alarming. Moreover, on alarming status, an email alert is sent to the doctor or caretaker to take appropriate action. Henceforth, the presented study aims to develop a cost-effective and efficient solution to monitor a patient's health remotely and inform the caregiver accordingly so that timely necessary action will be taken by the caregiver or doctor for the life safety of a patient ultimately contributing to reducing the annual death rate.