2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

Patient Vital Signs Monitoring via Android Application

Roy ABI ZEID DAOU
Lebanese German University,
Public Health Faculty,
Jounieh, Lebanon
Enlail: Labizeiddaou@lgu.eduJb

Elias AAD, Farid NAKHLE

different parameters controllable by the medical doctor (Heart

Rate, SP02, NIBP, EeG, temperature and respiration rate),
generating a daily report, analyzing results and notifying the
concerned parties when a questionable situation is recognized.
Added to that, the medical doctor can set for an appointment or
prescribe a medication to the patient. Another important feature
of this system is that it enables the connection of multiple
patients that are monitored by the same health professional.

Abstract-This
paper presents a system that is able to monitor
the patient vital signs (Heart Rate, SPO!, NIBP, ECG,
temperature and respiration rate) and send them continuously to
the doctor's android phone device. The system enables multiple
patients to be connected to the same doctor. Within the system,
the health care professional may activate/deactivate any of the
vital signs sensors. He can also set a prescription for the patient,
schedule a meeting,... When bad activities are received, a
message is directly sent to the doctor and to the patient relatives
in order to alert them. Note that the Bluetooth connection is used
to send/receive data between the patient platform and its android
system. The tested results showed an almost errol' free system
with an accuracy above 950/0 and a few milliseconds delay
between the vital signs reading and their upload over the server.

Whenever misconduct is read from one of the sensor, the

proposed system sends a direct notification to the medical
doctor and to the patient's relatives in order to alarm them of
its critical condition.
Hence, this paper will be divided as follow: in section 2, the
hardware system will be presented. The sensors deployed for
the measurement of the six vital signs are proposed. In section
3, the software part as well as the communication tools for data
transmission are introduced. Section 4 shows the whole
assembled system and some scenarios of its use. At the end,
section 5 presents the conclusion of this work and proposes
some future works.

Keywords=-tetemedicine: vital signs; btuetootn connection; real

time monitoring
I.

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, telemedicine is one of the most increasing

technology application applied to medical field because of the
cost reduction it may offer and the full monitoring ability it
insures [1] [2]. Even though it was launched by NASA in the
mid 60's of the previous century, the improvement in this
domain remained slow until the start of the current century,

II.

The applications in telemedicine are diverse and go fr0111a

simple medical data transmission and processing between a
patient and a health care professional to highly sophisticated
devices used in surgeries as the DaVinci Robot [5] [6]. In fact,
telemedicine usually takes control of the rehabilitation process
and enables the doctor or the medical staff to monitor the
patient health remotely without its physical presence. Hence, a
real-time transmission is needed with a minimal delay time
between signal capturing from the patient side and the signal
processing from the health care professional side.

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Hence, the proposed work presents a novel application

allowing a doctor to monitor his patient's health anytime and
anywhere via a communication protocol enabling a real time
exchange of data of the patient's main vital signs. As for the
specifications of the system, it allows the measurement of six

2015 IEEE

HARD\VARECONFIGURATION

Four sensors were implemented in order to measure the

patient's vital signs. The sensors are controlled by a board,
which is equipped by a Bluetooth module and a serial
communication interface [7]. Figure 1 represents the block
diagram of the whole system.

With the development of highly sophisticated and fast

communication tools, the real-time monitoring became
accessible and the developed countries found a way, by using
telemedicine, to reduce the huge bills they must pay for the
health sector [3]. However, such system is still not popular in
underdeveloped country as the required infrastructure is not
ready to handle it [4].

978-1-4673-6516-1/15/$31.00

Ali HAYEK, JosefBORCSOK

Department of Computer
Architecture and
System Programming, University
of Kassel
Kassel, Germany

STM32f103

Figure 1 - Block diagram of the hardware system from the patient side

166

2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

From this system, one can notice the presence of the

STTM32FI03 processor as well as the following sensors:

automatic message is generated when a mal-functionality is

found in at least one of the patients' vital signs.

Temperature sensor ranging from 20C to 45C;

.:

Pulse Oximetry (Sp02) ranging from 35 to 100%;

STMJ2f103

5 lead ECG with a voltage ranging between O.SlnV and

5nlV with up to 4000 samples/second/channel;

NIBP with a measurement range of 30mmHg-255nunHg

for the systolic blood pressure and ISnunHg-220nunHg
for the diastolic blood pressure;

These sensors
measurements:

perform

the

following

..,.,..

additional

Heart rate measurement ranging froIn 20 to 300 BPM from

the ECG and the SP02 sensors;

Respiratory wave that uses the chest impedance

measurement method from the ECG sensor with a
sampling range reaching 100 SPM;

Figure 2 - Block diagram of the connectivity hierarchy

Added to that, a power supply and a Bluetooth connection

are embedded on this board. The latter part will be developed

B. Communication tools

Added to that, a power supply and a Bluetooth connection

are embedded on this board. The latter part will be developed
in more details in section 3.

B. Communication tools
As for the communication, two modes are allowed: the
wireless communication via Bluetooth and the serial wired
communication. The first module will be the primary
communication method. Thus, it is mostly used as the data
will be sent wirelessly to the patient mobile device before
being transferred to the cloud.

As for the signals processing and amplification, different

filters were used, mainly for the ECG [8] [9] [10]. As the
module could be connected to the power line, a notch filter
was a must. This notch filter was responsible to eliminate the
noise generated by the sector line. In addition, the band pass
filter was implemented in order to eliminate all frequencies
lower than 0.5Hz or greater than 150Hz.

Different tools are used for the control of the data

transmission. Once the Bluetooth is connected, the mobile
application asks for the login credentials of the patient. Based
on the patient's identity, already stored on the server, the
application fetches the appropriate information and commands
related to it from the remote server. These information and
commands are pre-configured by the doctor from his special
control backend installed on his phone. Once this procedure is
completed, selected modules will be enabled or disabled
accordingly by sending the corresponding control orders to the
board,

Concerning the implementation of these filters, it can be

done by software or by hardware. A hardware implementation
may give better results but needs more time and costs more
money. However, we have chosen to implement the notch
filter along with a pre-amplification stage physical whereas for
the band pass filter, the muscles movement noise and the
second amplification stage, they are implemented within the
code.

This section will be divided into two parts: in the first

one, the software running and handling all electrical/electronic
sensors is presented whereas the second part deals with the

In fact, the sensors will keep monitoring their specific

parameters. However, only the required vital signs requested
by the doctor meprocessed by the application and sent to the
server. It is up to the processor of the board responding to the
commands received to select the data to be sent. During the

communication tools needs in order to keep the doctor updated

programming and in order to limit congestion, only the

with the evolution of his patients' health.

required data by the doctor is sent from the patient side to the
server. However, if the doctor doesn't specify any data, all six
vital signs are sent to the server and they are directly
accessible by the doctor. Here, we must note that the data
transmission speed differs from one sensor to the other
depending on the size of the block to be sent and the expected
changes in the vital sign over time.

III.

SOFTvVAREAND COM1vftJNICATION TOOLS

A. Software implementation
The first part shows the connectivity hierarchy of this
system. Once the data, COIningfrom any of the connected
sensors, is captured by the processor, it is sent, via the
Bluetooth connector, to the patient device. It is then sent to a
server that is accessible by the doctor. Figure 2 shows the
block diagram of the connectivity hierarchy consisting of the
patient, the health care professional and the patient's relative.
Note that this latter is found in this block diagram because an

As the medical professional is the administrator of the

system, he can access the data anytime and anywhere to view
it, enable/disable any of the sensors, set a medication or a
meeting and so on. The doctor can also change the parameters

167
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2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

configuration or require a new reading. Once a change is

capture from the doctor's side, the board reconfigures the
enabled/disabled sensors, reads all the values and sends the
required ones to the server.
To sum up, figure 3 shows the flowchart containing the
whole process starting from the login authentication till the
data fetching within the server.

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Figure 4 - Screen shots of the application from the doctor side

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Figure 3 - Software processing flow chart

Concerning the health care professional backend, a cross

platform application, developed for Android and lOS systems
using PHP, was proposed. TIns program is installed on his
phone and can be accessed from any web browser as well. It
helps to offer full control over the patient's device.
Not only will the doctor be able to add prescriptions and
view appointments, but he will also be able to request an on
demand test for the patient in order to checkup on his current
health status.
Added to that, the data history of eve IY patient will be
saved for easy and fast comparison between its current
conditions and its previous ones. These tests' results are saved,
sorted and displayed by date and time. On another hand, up on
patients' approval, their data can be donated to universities
and laboratories for medical studies and learning/teaching
purposes.
Figure 4 represents some screen shots of the application
from the medical professional side. In fact, one can notice a
screen shot to choose the patient, another one to read the
values of the tests, a third one for the history, a fourth one
containing the menu and the last one for the login
authentication.

AsSEMBLY

TECHNICS

In this fourth part, the diownstream exchange and the

upstream exchange technics will be presented. The
downstream exchange presents the communication from the
cloud to the board via the patient's phone. The incoming and
outgoing information exchanged with the board is partitioned
into packages of hexadecimal bytes specific for each sensor
and parameters required. The commands' info packages sent
by the phone to the board using the Bluetooth module are
divided into 2 pruts:
1. A package head set by default to OX55 OXAA formed
by 4 hexadecimal data sets;
2. A Data Package specific for each sensor to be activated
or disabled formed by 8 bits. This package struts with
a characterizing bit to select the appropriate sensor
needed.
As for the upstream exchange, it represents the
communication routing starting from the board to reach the
cloud and being accessible by the doctor's phone.
Once all commands are applied, the board responds with
information acquired from the sensors and, as already
described, it sends the data in hexadecimal format but this
time with different length depending on the activated sensor.
The data info packages sent by the board to the phone using
the Bluetooth module can be divided into two parts as follow:
1. A package head set by default to OX55 OXAA formed by
four hexadecimal data sets;
2. A Data Package specific for each sensor to be activated
or disabled formed by 12 hexadecimal data sets. This
package starts with a characterizing Bit to specify the
parameter sent (ECG - NIPB - SP02 - Temp).

2015 International Conference on Advances in Biomedical Engineering (ICABME)

better battery life to allow patients engage in longer time

outdoor activities.
On another hand, the safety and security aspects must be
viewed in more details in order to reduce or to limit the bad
effects that this system may cause to patients especially that it
is connected to them all day long. Thus, some more condensed
components may be used in order to let the patient feel more
comfortable in its movements.
REFERENCES

[1] V. Garshnek and F. 1. Burkle, "Telemedicine applied to

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[2] A. Martinez, V. Villarroel, J. Seoane and F. Pozo, "Rural
telemedicine for primary healthcare in developing
countries," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol.
23,no.2,pp.13-22,2004.
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1. Kyedar, "Success stories in Telemedicine: Some
empirical evidence," Journal of Telemedicine, vol. 9, no.
1,2003.
[4] 1. Puustjarvi and L. Puustjarvi, "Designing a cloud-based
multinational telemedicine ecosystem for developing
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[5] C. Iavazzo, X.-E. Gkegke, P.-E. lavazzo and 1. Gkegkes,
"Evolution of Robots Throughout History From
Hephaestus to Da Vinci Robot," Acta Medico-Historica
Adriatica, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 247-258,2014.
[6] M. Margaritescu, A. M. Eulampia Rolea and V. Vaduva,
"Virtual Modeling of a Laparoscopic Surgical Robot with
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[7] S. Kin1, C. Brendle, H.- Y. Lee, M. \Valter, S. Gloeggler,
S. Krueger and S. Leonhardt, "Evaluation of a 433 11Hz
Band Body Sensor Network for Biomedical
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[8] W. Yubo , K. Veluvolu and L. Minho, "Time-frequency
analysis of band-limited EEG with BMFLC and Kalman
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B.-G. Lee, B.-L. Lee and C. Wan-Young, "Mobile
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Figure 5 - Top view of the system/rom the patient side

V.

CONCLUSION

After presenting the proposed system from a hardware

and software points of view, this part will list the features of
the proposed system, will summarize the work done and will
propose some future works.
Concerning the system's features, they can be resumed as
follow:
Tasks to be done in emergency;
Capability of monitoring n10re than one patient by a
single doc;
Light weight portable device;
Safety measurements;
As for the summary, we have proposed a system that
measures six vital signs of a patient and transmit them to the
doctor via a web server that can be accessible anytime and
anywhere. The main vital signs (Heatt Rate, SP02, NlBP,
ECG, temperature and respiration rate) are captured on a
board carried by the patient. Signals are being sent to the
server in order to be accessible anytime/anywhere by the
doctor. The latter can also enable/disable any of the sensors in
real time. The medical history of the patient is also stored on
the server and alarms for medications and further

consultations are available options for the system.

Concerning the future works, lot of ideas can be
implemented to enrich this system, As a start, adding the
capability to store data while being offline and synchronizing
it once the connection is reestablished in no time is of major
concern. Another idea is to implement a video call between
the doctor and his patient allowing a live consultation and
diagnostic of the observed abnormalities. In addition, a lower
power consumption system would be designed allowing a

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