IoT-based Health Monitoring System for Intensive Care Units

Due to the critical condition and unique treatments required by ICU's patients, their vital signs should be continuously and reliably monitored. In this paper, we present a system to address this problem including the design considerations. Our system has three components: i) a mobile application to present the collected data from the hospitals server, ii) a database server with patients data and iii) a transactional server that manages and keeps the connection between the other two components. The mobile application implements a vital signs monitor for each patient including an underlying emergency notification system. After several simulations, we were able to identify that the proposed solution takes around 3 seconds to generate the notification after an emergency alarm occurs. Moreover, the application uses an average of 2.11 Kb/s of traffic data and a maximum of 250Mb of RAM. This system is a feature that will help to track the ICU patients status, allowing doctors and ICU managers to work outside the unit and to determine when their presence is required. Results show that relevant and accurate notifications can effectively reduce the time response in cases of emergency and consequently increases the likelihood of the patients' recovery.