Wearable Device for Telemedicine: An Architecture and Prototype Implementation for Remote Medical Diagnosis using Long Range Communication Protocols

Abstract

Due to rising population particularly in the developing countries, the need has increased for online medical services mostly for health monitoring and remote medical diagnosis for personal health care using telemedicine. Also, health care facilities and resources have been overwhelmed in many countries leading to poor quality of health care delivery and more expensive medication due to the continuous application of conventional face-to-face consultations in medical diagnosis. In attempt to deliver cost-effective and reliable remote medical consultations and diagnosis using telemedicine, short range communication protocols such as Bluetooth and ZigBee have been adopted for wearable devices. Existing wearable devices developed using these short range protocols for D2D communication are not supported by IoT gateways due interoperability issues. In this paper, a long range MQTT communication protocol with GPRS, GSM and GPS for transmitting vital signs from a wearable medical device to the cloud is proposed. A wearable hardware prototype using an IoT gateway via the A9G module and the Atmega 328 to transmit medical data to the cloud was implemented. The prototype device demonstrates that adopting long range communication protocol offers ubiquitous and fast medical data access for delivering professional healthcare services regardless of user location. The device enables patient and doctor interaction for remote medical diagnosis in real-time using a web interface by means of an API.