A home based health monitoring system: An implementation and evaluation

Abstract

The advances in technology over recent years have opened up a lot of opportunities in the field of wearable health monitoring. Technology equipment that was once reserved for hospital use may now be used in the home of a consumer; this could ease the life of many long term patients and their next of kin. We have been in contact with the case of a child, who suffers from a number of rare conditions and complications. She has to be monitored almost all the time in her home by her parents. She has been in and out of the hospital a number of times, without ever figuring out what causes her problems. Her parents have to use a lot of time and effort to monitor her. Our goal in this thesis was two-fold, automate and ease the monitoring of her as well as logging all the data of vital signs so that it may later be used for diagnosing. We made a prototype system using the hardware of a wearable monitoring shirt called the LifeShirt. Our main focus was to create a system that would allow for discussion around potential usage areas of the LifeShirt. We did live testing on the patient and evaluated the solution with the family and the patient s physician. We found that our prototype concept fulfills a need that is currently unmet. Their monitoring can be simplified, and the physician can get more data to use for diagnosing purposes. Based on our result we see a great potential for using wearable health monitoring technology in the home. We envisage many areas that could benefit from automated monitoring with the LifeShirt, both in home as well as in hospital settings.