Design and implementation of low cost, portable telemedicine system: An embedded technology and ICT approach

Abstract

In India, Primary Health Centre (PHC) were established to provide accessible, affordable and available first line health services. There are 23,109 PHCs in India and Under the National Rural Health Mission (NHRM) the Government is upgrading all the PHCs. Due to shortage of human resources, PHC system largely depends on "referral system", which in turn relies heavily on communication and transportation infrastructure. Communication and transportation put an upper limit on health care delivery to patient and some time it may cause casualties in remote areas. Development of Low cost Biomedical Sensors, Low cost Portable Embedded System, Internet and Smart phone based Telemedicine System may offer the opportunity to alleviate the health care system efficiency by number of application viz. data collection, chronic patient surveillance, to control the therapeutic procedure etc. This paper presents the work of design and implementation of low cost telemedicine system, which integrates the sensing, storage and broadcasting of various biomedical parameters of patient using low cost low weight and accurate biomedical sensors, BeagleBone Black as a computing unit and various softwares viz. Linux, Apace Server, MySQL and PHP. Implemented system is compared with various existing available biomedical sensors.