EAI Endorsed Transactions
on Scalable Information Systems Research Article
1
Ubiquitous Healthcare System: Architecture, Prototype
Design and Experimental Evaluations
Osama Rehman
1,*
, Asiya M. Al-Busaidi
2
, Sohaib Ahmed
1
, Kamran Ahsan
3
1
Department of Software Engineering, Bahria University, Karachi, Pakistan
2
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
3
Department of Computer Science, Federal Urdu University of Arts Science and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan
Abstract
Seamless and timely monitoring of patients remains an open challenge in current healthcare systems. The need especially
arises for patients with chronic diseases and those susceptible to sudden change in their health, such as cardiac patients and
elderly people. Hence, there is a need for designing an automated health monitoring system that could seamlessly and
efficiently collect patient information. This can largely improve the decisions made by medical professionals, especially in
emergency and time-critical cases. This work proposes the design of a ubiquitous healthcare systems, termed as Remote
Health Monitoring System (RHMS) that offers flexible and cost-effective solution. RHMS is designed to be wearable,
light-weight and comprise various small non-invasive medical sensors. Results show that RHMS has the potential to
provide physicians continuous monitor of patients through a centralized observation system without patients being
physically present at any medical facility.
Keywords: Arduino, Medical Sensors, Remote Health Monitoring, ZigBee.
Received on 22 August 2021, accepted on 23 December 2021, published on 05 January 2022
Copyright © 2022 Osama Rehman et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the
original work is properly cited.
doi: 10.4108/eai.5-1-2022.172779
*
Corresponding author. Email: osamahussain.bukc@bahria.edu.pk
1. Introduction
Providing quality healthcare services for the expanding
human population is turning into a genuine problem because
of the limited medical centres and resources [1-3].
Misdiagnosis or late diagnosis of patient’s condition can
cause complications on serious chronic diseases, such as in
Myocardial Infarction (MI) condition commonly known as
heart attack. Hence, early and correct diagnosis of such
diseases is important to potentially save lives of individuals,
significantly improve their quality of life and reduce
financial burden on individuals and governments. As a
result, there is a strong need to timely and continuously
monitor the patient’s health condition by observing several
health related parameters, including body temperature, pulse
rate, blood pressure, heart electrical signal
electrocardiogram (ECG) and body positioning [4, 5].
Ubiquitous healthcare systems is a promising approach
that has the capability to collect health related information
seamlessly by sensors attached to patient’s body [6, 7]. Such
systems can assist in monitoring the patient’s condition in
real-time, anytime and anywhere [8, 9]. As a result, the
initial signs and symptoms can be detected earlier that can
lead towards predicting patients’ future conditions, both
physically and physiologically. This in-turn can help in
reducing health care costs while simultaneously improving
patient care outcomes. This can be obtained through the
usage of one or more wearable sensors attached to the
patient’s body [10].
Indeed, critical decisions made by the medical staff can
largely depend on the gathered information originating from
such wearable sensors. Several ubiquitous healthcare
systems have been proposed previously but with week focus
EAI Endorsed Transactions on
Scalable Information Systems
04 2022 - 08 2022 | Volume 9 | Issue 4 | e6