GRD Journals | Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology

(ICIET) - 2016 | July 2016

e-ISSN: 2455-5703

A Survey on Android Based Patient Monitoring

System
1Nancy

Fernando E 2Gayathri S 3Roja Shree M 4Delshi Howsalya Devi R

1,2,3
M.E Scholar 4Assistant Professor
1,2,3,4
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
1,2,3,4
K.L.N. College of Engineering, Pottapalayam, Sivagangai 630612, India
Abstract

Patient monitoring is essential to care in operating and emergency rooms, as well as intensive and critical care settings. Recently
android has become one of the most popular technologies used in the medical sector. The aim of the paper addresses the survey on
android based patient monitoring system to provide a better health care to people in more economic and pertinent friendly manner.
Doctors can continuously monitor the patients health using the device attached to the patient and an android application. The
applications in the healthcare monitoring system remotely monitor the vital signs of the patient and transmit the recorded signal to
the doctor. The quality data obtained from the application helps in improving diagnostic and treatment related decision making.
This paper also addresses the comparison of the state of the arts solutions available in the healthcare monitoring systems and the
technologies used for generating emergency alarms.
Keyword- Android, Healthcare, Patient monitoring, Sensor, Bluetooth, Emergency alarm
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION
The modern prophet of healthcare industry is to provide better healthcare to people anytime and anywhere in the world in a more
cost-effective and patient friendly way. Therefore for increasing the patient care competence, improved patient monitoring devices
that are mobile are required. The medical world today faces two basic issues when it comes to patient monitoring paradigm. Firstly,
the health care providers presence near the patients bedside and secondly, the patient being wired to large machines and cannot
move from bed. In order to achieve a better quality in patient care, the above mentioned issues have to be solved. As an
improvement in bio instrumentation, computers and telecommunications technologies have moved ahead which has made possible
the design of portal vital sign tele-monitoring systems that are able to obtain, record, display and transmit the physiological or vital
signal from the human body to any location.
Modern works in communication technologies have motivated the development of telemedicine to a large extent.
Telemedicine reimbursement not only helps the customers who are able to receive health care more efficiently but also benefits
the doctors to modernize their efforts to take care of more patients. To a large extent computer based monitoring has become a
cheap necessity requiring deployment on a vast scale in various intensive care units around the world. Figure 1 shows the patient
monitoring. A class of such devices is a device that sends alerts if the patient gets into a critical or emergency state. Example of
one such device is a ECG monitor. The need for patient monitoring is very much apparent in situations where the patient is
In unsteady physiological regulatory systems in cases of drug overdose or anesthesia administration.
In a serious life threatening condition, for example where there are symptoms of a heart attack.
In risk of developing other life threatening conditions
It is likely that the doctors and nurses would want to be movable from place to place, when they visit a patient. Doctors
might need a tablet PC that stores current data and all record history for that particular patient. The architecture for supporting this
kind of systems could be designed in different ways but the main parts that have to be analysed are:
An infrastructure for monitoring devices, to push their data into a server along with a database
An infrastructure for the mobile devices to retrieve the data
The monitoring device stores all the data and applications that store these data

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A Survey on Android Based Patient Monitoring System

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Fig. 1: Patient monitoring system

Vital signs are the most basic entities that can be measured from a persons body. Providing health monitoring at home,
is particularly useful for patients, who are in a situation to live alone. This paper focuses on the automatic and modest measurement
of biomedical signals and patients activities. Ubiquitous health monitoring is an important forerunner for analysis and diagnosis,
allowing biomedical signals to be measured without the individuals awareness.
The rest of the paper is regulated as follows: Section II provides a literature survey of the papers taken for study. Section
III describes the criterion in which the system is evaluated. Section IV presents the applications of android on healthcare. Section
V provides conclusion of this paper.

II. LITERATURE SURVEY

Roy Abi zeid daou et al [1] proposed the patients vital signs like heart rate, SPO 2, NIBP, ECG, temperature and respiration rate
are monitored using sensors and the readings are sent to the doctor. The sensors can be activated or deactivated based on the need.
The doctor can send prescriptions to their patients or schedule a meeting. Whenever a patients health becomes worse, a message
is sent to the doctor and also to the patients relatives so that an action can be taken. In this paper [1] Bluetooth is used for connecting
the patient to his android system. Figure 2. Shows a connectivity diagram for the system [1].
In some cases the patients current vital signs are not enough for diagnosing or curing a disease. Maradugu Anil Kumar
et al [2] proposed a system in which the doctor needs to know about the history of the patients health. This paper presents a system
that provides a method to store patients history and helps in continuous monitoring of health conditions. The doctor can easily
monitor the patients vitals by using his smart phone or android device whenever and wherever he wants to

Fig. 2: connectivity hierarchy block diagram

Yuanyuan Du,et al[3] proposed a emergency alarm. Emergency situations can occur at any time or any place. It is difficult
to always have a person to look after another person. In such cases an emergency alarm and healthcare management system comes
into place. Using this system whenever a persons health is not good, the sensors detect the abnormalities and send a message to
the persons relatives and also to the doctor. In this way the doctor can prescribe medicine or provide necessary instructions to
rescue the person. In conditions with fewer emergencies the patient himself can ask the doctor for prescriptions. The life reminder

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A Survey on Android Based Patient Monitoring System

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system [3] that works as an alarm can be set to remind the patient about things like time for check-up, time to take regular tests,
etc.
Deepti Ameta et al [4] proposed a Medication reminder Patients generally require lots of clarifications about their disease
and therefore frequent interactions with the doctor are needed. Elder patients tend to forget their time for medicine dosage and
regular health check-up. In such cases an android system that provides various features becomes handy [4]. The system discussed
here provides an automatic alarm ringing system that helps to set dosage timings. A message will be sent either as an email or a
message to the patient with time, date and medicine description. Users can connect to a doctor as per the disease and also read
articles regarding the disease and get health tips. In this way the system provides healthcare advice to the patients throughout the
day.

III. SYSTEM EVALUATION

The literature is classified according to its subject into the following major categories: characteristics, methodology used, sensor
types, advantages and disadvantages of each system. Table 1 summarizes the characteristics and methodology used. Below the
table are the description of the various technologies used, advantages and disadvantages of the systems under study.
Title of the paper
Characteristics
Methodology/sensors
used
Paients vital signs Tasks
done
in Wireless
technology
monitoring
via emergency,
using Bluetooth,
android
Capability
of Serial
wired
application[1]
monitoring more than communication,
one patient by a
Temperature sensor,
single doctor,
Pulse oximetry sensor,
Light weight portable 5 lead ECG,
device,
NIBP
Safety measurements
Android
based Wireless machine to Ipv6 techniques
healthcare
machine healthcare,
Body area network,
monitoring
Telemedical systems,
Zigbee technology,
systems[2]
Micro controller based LM35 Body temperature
healthcare monitoring sensor,
Pulse oximetry sensor
An android based Online medical help,
Action monitoring,
emergency alarm Integration
of broadcasting,
and
healthcare emergency alarm and Alarm executor,
monitoring
healthcare
prescription
push
system[3]
module,
SSH framework
Medication
Medication adherence MotionPHR
health
reminder
and medication
record manager
healthcare-an
reminder,automatic
android
alarm,medicine
application[4]
scheduler
Table 1: System Evaluation

A. Technologies used
Pulse oximetry is a non-invasive method for observe a person's oxygen saturation (SO2). Its reading of SpO2 (peripheral oxygen
saturation) is not always similar to the reading of SaO2(arterial oxygen saturation) from arterial blood gas analysis, but the two are
faithfully enough correlated that the safe, convenient, non-invasive, inexpensive pulse oximetry method is wrathful for measuring
oxygen saturation in clinical use.
In its most common (transmissive) application mode, a sensor device is located on a thin part of the patient's body, usually
a fingertip or earlobe, or in the case of a child, across a foot. The device passes two wavelengths of light through the body part to
a photo detector. It measures the changing absorbance at each of the wavelengths, granting it to determine the absorbance due to
the pulsing arterial blood alone, excluding venous skin, blood, muscle, bone, muscle fat.
Bluetooth is a wireless technology standard for per mutating data over short distances (using short-wavelength UHF radio waves
in the ISM band from 2.4 to 2.485 GHz [4]) from unchanging and mobile devices, and building personal area networks (PANs).
Bluetooth is maintained by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), which consists of more than 25,000 member companies in
the areas of networking, telecommunication, computing, and consumer electronics.

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A Survey on Android Based Patient Monitoring System

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Zig Bee is based on IEEE 802.15.4 specification and it is best suited for high level communication protocol to create PSN
with small, low power radios. The Zig Bee technology is very easy and simple to use and is not as much as expensive as any other
wireless personal area network (WPAN) such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The technology which is defined by Zig Bee has some
applications like traffic management systems, electrical meters like wireless light switches, home-displays, and other consumer
and industrial equipments at shortest range with low rate wireless transfer of data.
Zig Bees low power consumption limits the transmission distance up to 10-100m between the line of sights depending
upon power consumption and environment characteristics. Zig Bee is used to transmit the signals over long distance and through
a mesh connected network over large distant. Zig Bee is mainly used in low data rate application because it has some issues on
battery life and security (Zig Bee networks are secured by 128 bit symmetric keys.)Zig Bee has a constant data rate of 250 Kbit/s
and it is best suited for intermittent data transmission from sensor to output devices.
B.

Advantages
The main advantages of android based healthcare systems discussed in this paper are as follows
Reduce or limit the bad effects that may be caused to patients by providing security and safety [1].
Comparison of past and current patient data using data stored in the server of the healthcare information system[1].
The system is connected to the patient all day long. The systems provide low complexity, low power consumptions, highly
portable for health care monitoring of patient [2].
The system eliminates the need of utilization of expensive facilities [3].
Easy access of the patient's information at anywhere and any place with the help of android web server [4].

C. Disadvantages
The disadvantages of android based healthcare systems discussed in this paper are as follows
More condensed [1].
Few milliseconds of delay occurred between reading signs and uploading to the server [1].
Components should be used in order to let the patient feel more comfortable in its movements.
Big database is required for storing data of multiple patients [2].
Network based issues occur [3].
Purchasing new hardware devices becomes costly and more time and money consuming [4].

IV. APPLICATIONS
The android application which is developed using UI is easy to understand and check the health status of the patient. Emergency
alarm, Alerts, Remainders, Notification alarms help the doctor to take timely decision at emergency situation. Doctors can check
the status of the patient all the time even by staying at any remote location by having synchronization between web application
and web server. Web-app acts as a reporting tool to view the detail of the patient periodically after every treatment. The main goal
will be achieved when patients at any location can be watched by the specialist profession without the need of physical presence.

V. CONCLUSION
Through this survey we have given a overview of the various works done in android healthcare management and alarm systems.
There is a high penetration of android based health care in the health sector with the emergence of new range of smart phones and
better customizable OS. Android health monitoring system is here to stay for the future. Thus android patient monitoring has the
capability to grow as a user community to help each other and serve efficiently during tragic situations.

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