Design and implementation of the vital sign box for home healthcare

The present PC technology is at the necessary and sufficient level for telecommunication-base home healthcare service. We developed a PC-base terminal (Vital Sign Box; VSB) and did a field test with it. As a result, we found that lighter and lower VSBs that could configure flexibly were required. To solve these problems, we shifted the hardware platform to embedded-PC (WindowsCE machine) and implemented a novel data input interface by using a character recognition technique. The resources of the embedded-PC are smaller than PCs, but we found that embedded-PC-base VSBs capabilities were sufficient. Also the character recognition data input interface separates sensor interface from the hardware platform of VSBs. In the future, we will be able to see different forms of VSBs such as software VSB, point-tool, by using that interface.