SESGARH: A scalable extensible smart-phone based mobile gateway and application for remote health monitoring

In this paper, we present “SESGARH”, a scalable and extensible smart-phone based healthcare system, to provide realtime continuous monitoring of health conditions of individuals seeking professional healthcare. The proposed system suggests an “anytime anywhere” health monitoring mechanism via an application providing rich contextual visualization of health data through easy-to-use interfaces. Using SESGARH, patients with chronic illnesses can send disease symptoms and other critical health information to a physician, who can analyze this data remotely and prescribe e-prescriptions. SESGARH can significantly minimize time taken for transmission of healthcare data from patient to physician and vice-versa, and improve the reach and quality of healthcare services. Proposed system is based on the ISO/IEEE11073 (X73) family of standards supporting high quality medical sensors, as well as wireless transport (e.g. Bluetooth, WiFi, Zigbee) for access to faster and reliable communication network resources. JSON, a lightweight text-based open standard, is used to represent the data, which is interchanged between SESGARH and remote server over HTTP. We have successfully implemented and demonstrated SESGARH — using ECG body sensors, a Smart-phone device acting as a mobile gateway running the application, and a remote server to which the physician is connected.