EVALUATING A REMOTE HEALTH MONITORING APPLICATION POWERED BY BLUETOOTH Maryam Vahabi, Hossein Fotouhi, Mats Björkman and Maria Lindén Mälardalen University; School of Innovation, Design and Technology, Sweden ABSTRACT It has become widely accepted that the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies are the key enablers for many emerging applications including remote health monitoring. Various physiological sensing devices have been designed and equipped with different radio technologies. The choice of radio hardware plays an important role on the overall performance of the system since it imposes some limitations on the delivered quality of service. Hence, it is critical to properly evaluate the embedded radio technology based on the application requirements. In this paper, we perform extensive experiments on Shimmer physiological sensors that is one of the leading providers of wearable wireless sensor products powered by Bluetooth classic radio. Shimmer sensors are designed and used for monitoring various human health information such as temperature, heart rate, movement, etc. We review and investigate different scenarios in which Shimmer devices are used by medical practitioners to monitor the ECG signal and the movement of a human. This study shows that the Shimmer device can provide reliable data delivery by using a specific configuration. For instance, employing a maximum number of seven Shimmer devices attached on a body at home environment within the range of at most 5 m and with the sampling rate of 512 Hz would result in a reasonable quality of service, while varying these parameters may degrade the overall performance. Mobility of human body, noisy environment, and higher packet transmission rates are some examples that will reduce the system quality. KEYWORDS Remote Health Monitoring, Internet of Things, Wireless Communication, Bluetooth, Interference 1. INTRODUCTION The advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless communication and hardware miniaturization is playing a key role in the development of remote health monitoring applications, making them more available and affordable [Doukas & Maglogiannis, 2012]. The number of elderly people (over 60 years of age) is expected to grow more than double, from 841 million individuals in 2013 to more than 2 billion in 2050 [United Nations, 2013]. This means that the health sector will require more support from digitalization through remote health monitoring in order to reduce the cost and increase health services to elderly people. Currently, there are a lot of effort in all over the world to provide digital healthcare. For instance, in Sweden, the vision for eHealth is that in 2025, Sweden will be best in the world at using the opportunities offered by digitization and eHealth to make it easier for people to achieve good and equal health and welfare, and to develop and strengthen their own resources for increased independence and participation in the life of society [Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, 2016]. IoT is a growing community that initially was focusing only on connectivity issues, where the main idea was to connect all devices (things) to the Internet [Reiter, 2014]. Thus, IoT was an extension to the traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which supports remote access to sensing devices. Though, the new IoT term covers wider area that integrates more aspects of physical devices rather than mere connectivity aspect, such as hardware design, computing power, software properties, communication protocols, data collection, data storage, data processing, data management and control loop. This way, IoT has become a multidisciplinary research area where both academia and industry are putting a lot of attention [Ray, 2018]. However, still in many IoT applications, such as remote health monitoring, one of the major research areas is providing reliable data communication over wireless medium with high QoS demands, while tackling various International Conference e-Health 2019 67