Secure Buddy System in Highly Managed Medical IoT for Patients with Intractable Diseases

Telemedicine for chronic disease management is extending to the home due to the coronavirus pandemic and patients with intractable diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease, are returning to their homes. Sophisticated alarm delivery for condition changes of patients and burden reduction of their families are foundations of telemedicine. This paper discusses reliable and flexible alarm delivery system for caregivers including patient’s family and introduces a buddy system which manage clinically necessary alarms from highly managed medical devices in the system. We discuss alarm analysis and reduction, zero-admin security, 920MHz radio integration, and degeneration operation in alarm delivery. We design a buddy system and an alarm delivery system taking advantage of the buddy and evaluate the alarm traffic when 920MHz wireless network is used. We, then, investigate the system with multi-hop 920MHz configuration intended for floor-wide alarm delivery system and raise issues of the system for further works. We conclude with our further work for interface standardization of medical buddy IoT systems.