1 Critical Patient eHealth Monitoring System using Wearable Sensors Michelle Omoogun, Visham Ramsurrun, Member, IEEE,, Shivanand Guness, Member, IEEE,, Preetila Seeam, Xavier Bellekens, Member, IEEE, and Amar Seeam, Member, IEEE Abstract—Patient monitoring has advanced over the years, from bed side monitors in the hospital, to wearable devices that can monitor patients and communicate their data remotely to medical servers over wireless networks. It is a process that involves monitoring major vital signs of a patient, to check if their health is normal or deteriorating within a period of time. In a remote situation, vital signs information, can help health care providers to easily send help to patients when their health is at immediate risk. The problem with this kind of remote monitoring system is that most times the patients must be within a specified location to either monitor their health or receive emergency help. This paper presents a potential solution in the form of a global vital sign monitoring system and consists of two components to demonstrate the functionality; a wearable wireless monitoring device that records the temperature and pulse rate of the patient wearing it and a web application, which allows the patient and the emergency response unit to interact together over cellular network. Index Terms—eHealth, Patient Monitoring, Smart Health, Wearable Sensors. I. INTRODUCTION Patient health monitoring is a very important process which helps doctors and other medical workers to offer various assistance, such as emergency services to patients when their health is deteriorating etc. Without constant health monitoring, doctors may not be able to diagnose some sicknesses on time which may lead to the patients being in various critical conditions [1]. Over the years a number of systems have been developed to cater for some of the issues related to health monitoring, however the aspect of continuous remote health monitoring of patients when they leave their homes temporarily for either a long or short period of time or permanently has not been greatly considered. This aspect can be really critical, because the patient’s registered hospital may not be able to reach the patient, during an emergency in such situations. This can lead to the patient getting into very serious conditions or led to death in extreme cases. Thus there is a need for a system to cater for this kind of health monitoring in remote situations. If such a system is put in place, patients can move freely while their health, will still be continuously monitored wherever they go and get the required help where ever they might be in the event of a medical emergency. Visham Ramsurrun, Shivanand P. Guness and Amar Seeam are with the Middlesex University (Mauritius Campus Branch), Vacoas, Mauritius {v.ramsurrun,s.guness,a.seeam} at mdx.ac.mu Xavier Bellekens is with University of Abertay, Dundee, Scotland, UK {x.bellekens} at abertay.ac.uk Health monitoring using a wireless sensor network, is a wireless based biomedical monitoring system, which con- stantly monitors vital signs of a patient such as their body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, ECG etc. and provides the data to a health-care provider to either assist in health diagnosis or check for health improvements of patients. Re- cently, there have been various research carried out on how health services can reach the masses, and also increase the interactivity between patients and doctors within and outside the hospital [2]. With every research, new methods, techniques are proposed and some implemented, with the aim of improv- ing the way a patient’s health can be easily monitored either within or outside the hospital. According to [3], constant medical check ups can be very helpful in various cases such as early detection of sicknesses, faster diagnosis during emergency cases and much more. Due to terminal illness or a particular medical issue, some people need to constantly monitor their health and visit the hospital regularly for constant check ups. Thus this becomes very stressful, expensive and time consuming for them. With the newly available technologies, a doctor can monitor his patient’s health remotely by the use of wireless sensors [4]. Although these existing systems help in cost reduction and quality health services [5], there are still threats to con- fidentiality, integrity and availability of the data retrieved by these sensors. As stated in [6], there is also need for interoperability to enable data gathered to be used, fully or partly across multiple health platforms and portability of these health monitoring sensors, to enable large amount of data to be constantly collected without affecting an individual’s daily activities. By doing this, health data analysis becomes easier and diagnosis is more precise [7]. However, some systems have tried to address some of these needs, but each of them still lack in one way or the other, thus leading to quest of a hybrid health monitoring system that will have all these functions in its architecture and be able to work independently rendering emergency assistance to patients wherever they may be and irrespective of the hospital they are registered to. This system will work with hospitals, by providing them with basic health details of a patient thus enabling them to provide a quick and accurate diagnosis. The rest of the paper is as follows. Section II surveys previous literature - it discusses the basic concept of health monitoring, including the types and ways in which patients’ health have been monitored over the past years. In this section, various wearable health sensors are discussed and a comparison is performed based on the various communication 978-1-5386-3831-6/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE