Smart under-five health care system

Abstract

Internet of Things based health care systems promise a significant contribution towards improvement of medical information systems through automation of routine monitoring of patients and real-time transmission of medical records. However, digitisation of identification, tracking and monitoring of patients remains a challenge in rural areas of Africa, not to mention of associated power and internet connectivity constraints. This paper proposes a general architecture for monitoring of growth and vital parameters of under-five children. The system alerts medical personnel in real time about under-weight cases or abnormal readings of vital parameters in order to take further medical diagnosis. Furthermore, the system saves the child's personalised measurements to a cloud-based data store in real time. Preliminary tests of network performance of the IoT application design resulted in an average latency of 1.7s and system availability of 99.96%, thus validating its usability.