Home telemonitoring of vital signs through a TV-based application for elderly patients

The early detection of changes in the health status of older people can be exploited to avoid unnecessary hospitalization and promoting independent living, reducing the costs associated with medical care. For this reason, there is a growing interest in technologies tailored for seniors that can provide home-based monitoring programs. This paper introduces a novel TV-based system capable of acquiring users' vital parameters such as blood pressure, pulse rate, body weight and blood glucose level from Bluetooth commercial devices installed at home, transmitting them to a remote server hosting an interoperable software framework for telemonitoring. The core of the system is a novel Android application hosted on a minicomputer connected to the TV set and controlled simply through the remote control. In this work we include support for several Bluetooth profiles and protocols, analysing their different requirements and proposing a modular expandable implementation.