The IoT-based heart disease monitoring system for pervasive healthcare service

In China, most of heart attack results in death before the patients get any treatment. Because the traditional healthcare mode is passive, by which patients call the healthcare service by themselves. Consequently, they usually fail to call the service if they are unconscious when the heart disease attacks. The Internet of Things (IoT) techniques have overwhelming superiority in solving the problem of heart diseases patients care as they can change the service mode into a pervasive way, and trigger the healthcare service based on patients' physical status rather than their feelings. In order to realize the pervasive healthcare service, a remote monitoring system is essential. In this paper, we proposed a pervasive monitoring system that can send patients' physical signs to remote medical applications in real time. The system is mainly composed of two parts: the data acquisition part and the data transmission part. The monitoring scheme (monitoring parameters and frequency for each parameter) is the key point of the data acquisition part, and we designed it based on interviews to medical experts. Multiple physical signs (blood pressure, ECG, SpO2, heart rate, pulse rate, blood fat and blood glucose) as well as an environmental indicator (patients' location) are designed to be sampled at different rates continuously. Four data transmission modes are presented taking patients' risk, medical analysis needs, demands for communication and computing resources into consideration. Finally, a sample prototype is implemented to present an overview of the system. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.