Wearable IoT enabled real-time health monitoring system

Wan et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and (2018) 2018:298 Networking https://doi.org/10.1186/s13638-018-1308-x R ES EA R CH Open Access Wearable IoT enabled real-time health monitoring system Jie Wan1* , Munassar A. A. H. Al-awlaqi1 , MingSong Li3 , Michael O’Grady2 , Xiang Gu1 , Jin Wang1 and Ning Cao4 Abstract As the age profile of many societies continues to increase, in addition to the increasing population of people affected by chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and so on, supporting health, both mentally and physically, is of increasing importance if independent living is to be maintained. Sensing, remote health monitoring, and, ultimately, recognising activities of daily living have been an promising solution. From a technical perspective, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining a rapidly growing attention in many disciplines, especially in personalised healthcare. Meanwhile, body area sensor network (BASN) under the IoT framework has been widely applied for ubiquitous health monitoring, for example. ECG monitoring has been commonly adopted as vital approach for diagnosing heart disease. The main contribution of this paper include the following: firstly, this paper presents a novel system, the WISE (Wearable IoT-cloud-baSed hEalth monitoring system), for real-time personal health monitoring. WISE adopts the BASN (body area sensor network) framework in the support of real-time health monitoring. Several wearable sensors have been embedded, including the heartbeat, body temperature, and the blood pressure sensors. Secondly, the majority of existing wearable health monitoring systems requisite a smart phone as data processing, visualisation, and transmission gateway, which will indeed impact the normal daily use of the smart phone. Whilst in WISE, data gathered from the BASN are directly transmitted to the cloud, and a lightweight wearable LCD can be embedded as an alternative solution for quick view of the real-time data. Keywords: Internet of things, Wearable, Cloud computing, Health monitoring 1 Introduction The size and composition of the world population has changed over the last couple of decades, and these trends are projected to continue. Such demographic trends have significant implications for almost all areas of the society, particularly in health and healthcare. Life expectancy has increased dramatically, especially in the more affluent nations, which is set to be celebrated and should be viewed as an opportunity for people to live longer and better. However, this requires substantial improvement in both the healthcare service and the living environment, as older people generally require more healthcare than their younger counterparts. Additionally, older people are more likely to suffer from chronic disease as part of the natural ageing process. In parallel to this demographic *Correspondence: NanTong University China, SeYuan Road, NanTong, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article 1 time bomb, the cost of healthcare provision is increasing rapidly in all the nations across the world. For example, China spent over 50 million Yuan on healthcare infrastructure in 2001, which was 4.58% of its total GDP, whilst the figure increased up to over 400 million Yuan in 2015, which account for approximately 6.05% of the total GDP. To move forward, embedding modern information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare system is expected to deliver more effective and efficient healthcare services to patients with chronic disease and elderly. In the meantime, several phenomena have been risen, such as ambient assisted living (AAL) [1, 2], ubiquitous healthcare, and IoT for healthcare [3]. Such terms all differ with each other, whilst all are co-related. IoT emphasises the interconnection of all physical and digital items including sensors, smart devices, cyber sensors, and so much more, which allows the automatic and efficient data transmission and shared over the Internet. Hence, empowering the utility of IoT in healthcare, with © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. Wan et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2018) 2018:298 interconnected medical sensors, especially wearable or implantable, is considered to be able to provide smart accurate and cost-effective personalised healthcare service [4]. A general architecture of IoT-enabled healthcare is illustrated in Fig. 1. The sensing layer is designated to observing the users’ health condition both physically, mentally, and emotionally; thereby, a set of sensors can be embedded [5], for example, the wearable sensors such as ECG and blood pressure, to collect the biomedical parameters, the GPS sensor for positioning and localisation, and RFID for identification. In addition, smart homes are often frequently applied for sensing the information of the users’ immediate surroundings, such as the home conditions and the items used [6]. Secondly, the network layer enables the efficient and secure data transmission to corresponding data process units [7]. A number of shortrange communication protocols have been widely applied, such as ZigBee. More recently, several new techniques Fig. 1 IoT for healthcare: a overall framework of embedding IOT technologies for personalised healthcare Page 2 of 10 Wan et al. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2018) 2018:298 have been introduced, such as the 6LowPAN [8], NBIOT [9], and LoRa. And then, the third layer is the Data Processing module, which is responsible for retrieving valuable knowledge from the sensor data that obtained from the first layer. Learning-based approaches have been the most promising solution for data mining. Finally, based upon the conduction of the top three layers, intelligent services and applications can be delivered, such as disease diagnosis, behaviour recognition [10], and smart assistance. In this paper, we presented a framework of the Wearable IoT-cloud-baSed hEalth monitoring system (WISE). This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 illustrates the related research in IoT-enabled personal healthcare for assisted living. Section 3 demonstrates the design, methodology, and experiment results of the proposed WISE system. Section 4 outlines the discussion and future works, after which this paper is concluded in Section 5. increasing attention, and countless applications have been developed [14, 15]. Page 3 of 10 2.1.1 Mobile phones with GPS Mobile phones are commonly harnessed for outdoor tracking systems, se (...truncated)