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Design and Development of Patient Monitoring System
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2017 IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 226 012094
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
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Design and Development of Patient Monitoring System
Azra Hazwanie Azizulkarim1, Muhammad Mahadi Abdul Jamil1,* and
Radzi Ambar1, 2
1
Biomedical Modelling and Simulation (BIOMEMS) Research Group, Department of
Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
2
Embedded Computing System (EmbCoS) Research Group, Department of Computer
Engineering, Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein
Onn Malaysia, 86400 Parit Raja, Johor, Malaysia
Corresponding author: mahadi@uthm.edu.my
Abstract. Patient monitoring system allows continuous monitoring of patient vital signs,
support decision making among medical personnel and help enhance patient care. This system
can consist of devices that measure, display and record human’s vital signs, including body
temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and other health-related criteria. This paper proposes a
system to monitor the patient’s conditions by monitoring the body temperature and pulse rate.
The system consists of a pulse rate monitoring software and a wearable device that can
measure a subject’s temperature and pulse rate only by using a fingertip. The device is able to
record the measurement data and interface to PC via Arduino microcontroller. The recorded
data can be viewed as a historical file or can be archived for further analysis. This work also
describes the preliminary experimental results of the selected sensors to show the usefulness of
the sensors for the proposed patient monitoring system.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, the public especially adults, would prefer not to give priority to routine health checkups
mainly because they feel healthy. However, what they do not realize is that, the objective of regular
medical checkups is to verify any medical problems as early as possible, so that they can avoid serious
medical related troubles in the future. Furthermore, regular visits to physicians can provide them about
their health current situation, which in turn, encourage them to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Another
reason why the awareness of regular health checkups are low is because time constraints and
transportation difficulty to visit health provider. These are also the reasons why patients with any
particular illnesses who are recuperating at home have the tendency to skip regular medical check-ups
at the hospital.
Therefore, in order to help the public to take care of their health within the comfort of their own
home, there is the need to provide them with a portable health monitoring system which is low cost
and easy to use. This work is motivated by this objective, by designing a portable patient monitoring
system which can monitor body temperature and pulse rate. By using the proposed system, medical
personnel can further monitor and analyze patient’s condition at his/her office without the need to
meet patients.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the literature review related to patient
monitoring system. The development of the system and experimental methods are discussed in section
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
1234567890
3 and 4, respectively. The experimental results and discussion are described in section 5. Finally, a
brief conclusion is given in section 6.
2. Literature Review
The important thing in health care is to know the conditions of the main vital signs which can be
routinely monitored by health providers. Vital signs made up of body temperature, pulse rate,
respiration rate (breathing rate) and blood pressure. Vital signs are useful in detecting or monitoring
medical problems. Furthermore, vital signs can be monitored at health providers, at the site of a
medical emergency and even at home.
There are many designs of the vital signs monitoring system in literature. Parekh has designed
sensors for wearable vital signs measurement system to monitor body temperature, respiratory rate and
blood pressure [1]. The work uses a thermistor as a temperature sensor, a pulse oximeter to measure
blood pressure and electrocardiogram to measure heart rate. The obtained data is in real time and sent
to the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to display the output. Montgomery et al. developed a
wearable physiological monitoring system for astronauts called LifeGuard which is also applicable to
clinical and home-health monitoring application [2]. The device is capable of measuring ECG,
temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and blood pressure. More recently, Laine et
al. developed ubiquitous healthcare systems using the Zigbee-based sensor to gather vital signs data
such as ECG and heart rate [3]. The developed device is also equipped with alarms, notifications, and
analysis of medical data.
There are also various vital sign monitoring devices in the market such as Welch Allyn’s Spot Vital
Signs LXi and CASMED’s 740 Vital Signs Monitor [4-5]. However, these devices are very expensive
and have a complex system which is difficult for home-based monitoring purposes.
3. Development of the Patient Monitoring System
Figure 1 shows the framework of the proposed patient monitoring system which will hopefully help
the medical personnel on monitoring patient’s vital sign from far. The system will use an alert system
via email that can save cost and time for both parties.
The system consists of a wearable device for fingertip which is connected to an Arduino UNO that
processes the input from all sensors, and then, output the results using LCD display and PC. As
explained in the previous section, the device is consists of a temperature sensor and pulse sensor. The
user measures the body temperature by touching the temperature sensor. Figure 2 shows the DS18B20
temperature sensor utilized in this work. This sensor can measure temperatures between temperature
ranges of –55[°C] to +125[°C] and is accurate to ± 0.5[°C], over the range of –10[°C] to +85[°C].
Moreover, it has a fast response time with low power consumption, making it suitable for medical
applications. In the proposed monitoring system, the body temperature value is displayed on an LCD.
On the other hand, a pulse sensor is used to detect the user’s pulse rate. Figure 3 shows a SN-Pulse
pulse sensor utilized in this work. This sensor is a well-designed plug-and-play heart-rate sensor for
Arduino UNO.
Figure 4 shows how the wearable device for fingertip is developed. As shown in the figure, the
pulse sensor is attached on a Velcro strap, where the user will strap the sensor on his/her fingertip to
measure pulse rate. Figure 5 shows an image of how the device is strapped on the fingertip. During
this condition, the pulse rate and heartbeat waveform will be displayed on a PC monitor using
Processing software.
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
1234567890
Figure 1. Framework of the proposed patient monitoring system
Figure 2. DS18B20 Temperature Sensor Figure 3. SN-Pulse Sensor
Figure 4. The SN-Pulse sensor attached on a Velcro strap Figure 5. Pulse sensor strapped on the fingertip to
measure heart rate.
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
1234567890
4. Experimental Methods
In order to design an effective monitoring system, the usefulness of the temperature sensor and pulse
sensor were verified through simple experiments.
Temperature sensor test: First, there are 3 cases for experiment using a temperature sensor:
Case 1: cold condition – the test subject was asked to hold an ice cube using his fingertips for 10[s]
before touching the temperature sensor for 30[s], where the finger temperature was measured
during this period. The result was displayed on the LCD and logged to PC.
Case 2: normal condition – the test subject was asked to touch the temperature sensor for 30[s] in
room condition. The subject’s finger temperature was measured during this period. The result was
displayed on the LCD and logged into the PC.
Case 3: hot condition – the test subject was asked to touch a warm water bottle using his fingertips
for 15[s] before touching the temperature sensor for 30[s] before touching the temperature sensor
for 30[s]. The subject’s body temperature was measured during this period. The result was
displayed on the LCD and logged into the PC.
Pulse sensor test: In the second experiment, a user was asked to strap the pulse sensor on his fingertip
as shown in Figure 5. At this moment, the user was able to verify his heart rate and heartbeat
waveform on the PC monitor. Measurements were taken on two conditions, after running and at rest.
In each condition, measurement was taken for 30[s].
5. Experimental Results and Discussion
Figure 6 shows the temperature sensor’s experimental setup for the temperature sensor test. Figure
6(a) shows the user touches the temperature sensor, and the LCD displays the body temperature.
Figure 6(b) shows various temperature readings depending on the subject’s fingertip temperature.
(a) (b)
Figure 6. Experimental setup to test the temperature sensor. (a) Subject touches the temperature sensor.
(b) LCD shows changes in body temperatures.
As explained in the previous section, there are 3 cases of an experiment to show the usefulness of
the chosen temperature sensor: cold, normal and hot conditions. Figure 7 shows the result for these 3
cases. As shown in the figure, for case 1 (cold condition), the body temperature is recorded between
20[°C] to 40[°C], compared to the case 3 (hot condition) results, where the body temperature is
recorded between 100[°C] to 120[°C]. While in case 2 (normal condition), the body temperature is
recorded between 60[°C] to 80[°C]. This shows that the temperature sensor can demonstrate different
temperature levels clearly based on various temperature sources.
Figure 7 shows two readings of pulse rate in two conditions: after running and at rest, each
condition was done for a period of 30[s]. Based on this figure, the pulse rate measurement after the
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
1234567890
subject did a short running session shows significant higher pulse rate, where the recorded data is
between 100 to 150 beats per minute (BPM). While at rest, the subject’s pulse rate is between 60 to 80
BPM. This result shows that the chosen pulse rate sensor is useful to measure the heartbeat of a
person, where the pulse rate may fluctuate due to exercise activities, illness, injury, and emotions.
Finally, Figure 8 shows the pulse rate of a test subject in real-time developed using Processing
software. The figure shows the pulse rate waveform and the pulse rate updated every heartbeat.
Figure 7. Graph of temperature reading against time.
Figure 8. Graph of pulse rate reading (BPM) against time.
Pulse window
with live Heart rate
heartbeat window
waveform updates every
heartbeat
Figure 9. Software displaying the pulse rate of a test subject.
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International Research and Innovation Summit (IRIS2017) IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering 226 (2017) 012094 doi:10.1088/1757-899X/226/1/012094
1234567890
Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented and evaluated temperature and pulse rate sensors for a low-cost vital
sign monitoring system. The experimental result shows the usefulness of the selected sensors for the
proposed system. Temperature sensors have been tested to measure the body temperature of a subject
in 3 cases: cold, normal and hot conditions. While the pulse sensor was tested by a subject and
measurements were taken on two occasions, after running and at rest. The result shows that both
sensors are capable of providing sufficient data for vital signs monitoring purposes. Based on these
experimental results, for the next step of development is to develop an automatic vital signs data
sending capability via e-mail to make sure that the data can be sent to the health providers’ medical
personnel at the comfort of the user’s home.
Table 1 shows the price list of the main hardware parts used in the proposed device. An advantage
of the developed prototype is it costs less than the existing application because of the factor of
hardware (sensor, etc.) used in this prototype are low-cost and affordable, but in a good quality
condition.
Table 1. List of the price of hardware.
Types of hardware Price per unit (RM)
DS18B20 Temperature Sensor 17.00
SN-Pulse Sensor 115.00
Arduino UNO 101.76
LCD Display 16.00
TOTAL 249.76
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank Supervisor, Associate Professor Dr. Muhammad Mahadi Bin Abdul
Jamil for his insightful ideas, invaluable discussions, and encouragement in finishing this project.
References
[1] A reference Parekh, D. (2010). Designing heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature
sensors for the mobile on-call system. Bachelor Degree Thesis. McMaster University.
[2] Montgomery, K., et al. (2004). Lifeguard - a personal physiological monitor for extreme
environments. Proc. of The 26th Annual Int. Conf. of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology Society, pp. 2192-2195.
[3] Laine, T. H., Lee, C. and Suk, H., (2014). Mobile gateway for ubiquitous healthcare system
using ZigBee and Bluetooth. Proc. of 8th Int. Conf. on Innovative Mobile and Internet
Services in Ubiquitous Computing, pp. 139-145.
[4] Spot Vital Signs LXi (Factory refurbished). Welch Allyn. Retrieved from
https://www.welchallyn.com/en/products/categories/factory-refurbished/patient-
monitors/spot-vital-signs--lxi--refurbished--with-optional-stand.html
[5] 740 Vital Signs Monitor. CASMED. Retrieved from http://www.casmed.com/740Rev02.pdf
