LifeMOTE - Decision-Parametric System for Health Telematics. General and Hardware Aspects Marius C. Luculescu*. Claudiu I. Enache.** Simona Lache*. Sorin C. Zamfira* *Precision Mechanics and Mechatronics Department, Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania (e-mail: lucmar@unitbv.ro; slache@unitbv.ro; zamfira@unitbv.ro). **CLAMAR Software, Romania, (e-mail: claudiu.enache@clamar.ro) Abstract: Collecting information about the health status of patients offers a lot of advantages. This can be done in hospitals, medical offices or special laboratories where the patients come for the investigation of different diseases. Information acquired is useful for establishing a diagnostic, but most times they are current values reflecting the health status from that moment. Unfortunately, there are many diseases that require a long time monitoring of physiological parameters for having an overview of the health status of the patient, during different types of activities and for identifying the right diagnostic. There are also many cases when the vital parameters have to be monitored in real-time and if some of them exceed the normal limits an immediately alarm has to be triggered, allowing the first aid team to locate the patient and intervene in the shortest time. This paper presents general and hardware aspects for a health telematics system for remote monitoring the patients’ health status information. The software aspects regarding management of patients’ information will be presented in a distinct paper. Acquiring data, local storing and/ or sending to a server, analyzing them in real-time based on some parametric rules, all of these are important steps for the system to decide about the health status of a patient and announce any problem that may rise. Keywords: Monitoring, health, telematics, telemedicine, patient, remote, physiological, bio-medical, instrumentation, bio-mechatronics. 1. INTRODUCTION Tracking a patient with serious health problems and collecting information about the location, physiological status, movement and personal behavior is one of the high important recent topics, due to the great advantages offered. The simple collection of this kind of information may be sometime useless if they are not sent to certain equipment for processing the data and storing the results. According to these results, certain type of actions can be triggered, solving cases in which seconds are matters of life and death. Sending, receiving and storing information via telecommunication devices in conjunction with effecting control on remote objects is one application of the so-called telematics. Being a combination between Telecommunications and Informatics, telematics describes the process of long-distance transmission of computer-based information, as Nora, S. and Minc, A. (1978) described in their paper. If we take into account the health status of the patients, we can name this, health telematics, as Rigby, M. et al. (2000) stated in their book. Health telematics is a top subject not only in Europe, but in the whole world. At the European Commission level, “The Health Telematics Working Group of the High Level Committee on Health was asked to review the introduction of information and communications technology (ICT) in the health sector, the factors promoting or inhibiting its development, and areas where Community legislation could be beneficial”, as it was stated in the final report (2003). At the Magdeburg Expert Summit, “leading experts present all the different aspects to be met for practically enabling advanced health telematics and telemedicine such as architectural issues, electronic health records, communication, security and safety as well as the legal and ethical implications”, as Blobel, B. and Pharow, P. (2003) described in their book. 2. PROBLEM FORMULATION A Patient’ Health Tracking System (PHTS) is a data acquisition system for physiological parameters, composed of two subsystems: hardware and software. The hardware part is responsible for acquiring health status data, local storing and/ or sending them to a server. Regarding the software, low level programing language functions are usually used for data acquisition and communication and high level programming language, for processing data, displaying and storing results in a database. A PHTS can act individually and collects and stores information in a local memory (similar as a data-logger), this type being called “passive PHTS”. At some moments all the acquired information or only certain values can be transferred to a personal computer or to a server in order to be processed.