An mHealth Monitoring System for Telemedicine Based on WebSocket Wireless Communication Weiping Zhang, Regina Stoll Institute for Preventive Medicine, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany Email: {weiping.zhang, regina.stoll}@uni-rostock.de Norbert Stoll and Kerstin Thurow Center for Life Science Automation, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany Email: { norbert.stoll, kerstin.thurow }@celisca.de Abstract—The telemedicine system is a new medical monitoring model which uses sensor communication technology, computer information technology and modern medical technology. This paper, based on real-time web communication technology HTML5-WebSocket, describes the development of a scalable, real-time, multi-parameter, remote monitoring system. The system consists of sensors, mobile front control side, and a module-based remote monitoring platform. It has a variety of network functions, such as transmission of multiple physiological parameters, search, and export. In addition, the system provides real- time monitoring, data review, waveform check, and real- time doctor-patient communication. Since no additional software needs to be installed at the client, maintenance cost is reduced while the versatility is enhanced. Index Terms—eHealth, telemedicine, WebSocket, mhealth, telematics platform I. INTRODUCTION Increasing life expectancy, due to medical progress, and decreasing birth rates lead to a change in the population structure of Germany. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the percentage of people over the age of 65 is steadily increasing while the number of people under the age of 25 is declining [1]. This results in continuously rising costs for healthcare, especially for elderly people. One approach to this problem is the utilization of telemedicine systems to enable a relocation of the therapy to the patient’s home, thus shortening the expensive periods of hospitalization. A real-time remote monitoring system can provide valuable information for diagnosis and therapy. Remote monitoring combines elements from different research areas, such as sensor communication technology, computer information technology, medical technology, and medical monitoring management [2]. Real-time data from wearable sensor devices are sent to smartphones over a short range wireless connection then forwarded to the remote monitoring platform via Wi-Fi, 2G or 3G. At the monitoring platform the medical data can be displayed or stored in a database. Conventional ECG monitoring, for instance, can provide important clues for the diagnosis of a patient’s condition. A trend in biomedical engineering research is towards wireless systems that concurrently monitor multiple physiological parameters, such as ECG, respiration and acceleration. Figure 1. Projected Percentage of Elderly People in German Population (Source: German Federal Bureau of Statistics 2010) Most of the existing remote multi-physiological parameter monitoring systems use Client/Server (C/S) structure in conjunction with a Browser/Server (B/S) structure. The C/S structure provides data collection while the B/S structure provides data management. The mobile client sends collected physiological parameters to a server. In a traditional B/S application, doctors or researchers send an HTTP request, via a web browser, the server receives, checks, and processes the request, returns the response, and, finally, the client browser displays the information. This mechanism might work for applications where information does not change frequently, however, for applications which require quick, real time response, such as remote monitoring, it cannot accurately realize real time results; the information displayed on the client side may be outdated on the server. In addition, the system doesn’t support real time doctor-patient communication and data can only be transferred one way. In this new connection, keeping the client and server This work was supported in part by eHealth-MV (Mecklenburg Vorpommern Germany). JOURNAL OF NETWORKS, VOL. 8, NO. 4, APRIL 2013 955 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER doi:10.4304/jnw.8.4.955-962