An integrated system for wireless monitoring of chronic patients and elderly people

In the last years the demographic changes and ageing of population increase health care demand. Increasing number of chronic patients and elders requires close attention to their health conditions. In this paper we present the realization of a wireless monitoring system capable to measure process and transmit patient's physiologic signals (electrocardiogram, respiratory rhythm, arterial saturation of oxygen, blood pressure and body temperature) to a central medical server. The use of our system is suitable for continuous long-time monitoring, as a part of a diagnostic procedure or can achieve medical assistance of a chronic condition. We use custom developed and commercially available devices, low power microcontrollers and RF transceivers that perform the measurements and transmit them to the Personal Server. The Personal Server, in form of a PDA, that running a monitor application, receives the physiological signals from monitoring devices, activates the alarms when the monitored parameters exceed the preset limits, and communicates periodically to the central server by using WiFi or GSM/GPRS connection.