IEEE EUROCON 2017, 6–8 JULY 2017, OHRID, R. MACEDONIA
978-1-5090-3843-5/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Cloud %ased 6olution for 9ital 6igns 7racking
Valentin Rakovic, Daniel Denkovski, Vladimir
Atanasovski, Liljana Gavrilovska
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information
Technologies
Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje
Skopje, Macedonia
{valentin,danield,vladimir,liljana}@feit.ukim.edu.mk
Harm op den Akker, Cristian-Dan Bara
Roessingh Research and Development, Telemedicine group
University of Twente
Enschede, Netherlands
H.opdenAkker@rrd.nl, baracristian.86@gmail.com
Abstract— eHealth technology can bring a variety of benefits
to patients, caregivers, and health institutions, by facilitating
improved healthcare services through the utilization of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The
forthcoming generation of healthcare services will require
advances in computing and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in
order to leverage truly intelligent and adaptive features for
smarter eHealth services. This paper proposes a multi-sensory
cloud based system capable of monitoring and tracking the
patient’s behavior with respect to his vital signs. The paper also
showcases the proposed system on a real testbed, performing
real-time vital signs data acquisition, processing, and monitoring.
Keywords— eHealth; sensor network; vital signs; cloud
computing; eWALL;
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet-of-Things and cloud computing have a
potential to support a number of different applications
regarding users’ lifestyle, convenience, comfort, security, etc.,
and most importantly health. The smart-homes for eHealth
incorporate different sensing devices such as fixed sensors for
environmental monitoring and wearable sensors for activity
and vitals detection. A complete end-to-end system for
healthcare services besides devices should comprise local and
cloud software and interfaces to provide end-to-end flow of
medical data. The benefiters of the system can vary from the
patients themselves, providing health information and
guidance on how to improve their health, to caregivers and
health institutions, for monitoring and tracking the patient’s
behavior and his/her wellbeing. One of the main goals of the
system is the timely diagnosis and treatment of the possible
health issues. Especially important is the monitoring and
tracking of the patient’s vital signs.
Continua health Alliance (CA) [1] is a not-for-profit
industry organization, aiming to provide end-to-end, plug-and-
play connectivity of devices and services for health
management and healthcare. This organization is working
towards establishing systems with interoperable eHealth
devices and services via its product certification program.
Continua Health Alliance products make use of the ISO/IEEE
11073 standards for health data management. They provide
USB, Bluetooth and Zigbee interfacing of connected medical
devices including pulse oximeters, blood pressure monitors,
thermometers, glucose meters, weighting scales etc.
This paper proposes a CA facilitated multi-sensory cloud
based end-to-end solution. The proposed solution/system
monitors, tracks and provides services with respect to the
patient’s vital signs. The paper also provides insights into the
actual implementation and operation of the proposed system
on a real-world testbed, performing real-time vital signs data
acquisition, processing and monitoring.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II introduces the
end-to-end architecture for vital signs monitoring with the
necessary functional blocks and interfaces. Section III
provides details on the data acquisition process. Section IV
elaborates on the intelligent processing and manipulation with
the vital signs data and provides particular implementation
results. Finally, section V concludes the paper.
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
This section presents the generic eWALL architecture
(backend technology), with particular emphasis on the
functionalities for smart vital signs monitoring. The eWALL
architecture, as depicted in Fig. 1 consists of two main
components, home environment and eWALL cloud.
Fig. 1. Generic eWALL architecture.
The home environment is consisted of two core modules, a
sensor network and a graphical user interface (GUI). The
sensor network acquires information with respect to the
environment, such as temperature, pressure, humidity,
luminance, gasses etc., as well as information regarding the
primary user’s wellbeing, such as the vital signs. The GUI
represents the visual interface that facilitates the interaction
between the primary user and the system. Moreover, the GUI
This work was supported by the EC FP7 eWALL (610658) project.
525