HEALTH MONITORING TECHNOLOGIES

Health Monitoring Technologies



Comparing Health Monitoring Technologies

Introduction

Over the past few years, various technologies have been widely used for the purpose of remote or local monitoring of patients with chronic diseases. Wireless sensor networks can be considered as the most emerging area due to its applications for health care industry. This is a survey paper discussing and comparing some of the common technologies and gadgets used for health monitoring; wireless sensor networks can be seen to be embedded in most of these health care equipments.

Discussion

Wireless Sensors and networks have the capability to provide extensive benefits to the patients, as well as the health care providers (Alemdar and Ersoy, 2010). Some of the major applications of these networks include local and remote monitoring of patients. In the following, some of the health care gadgets based on WSN's are discussed.

2net Platform

This platform is designed to provide wireless health care solutions using cloud computing technologies. Using 2net platform, it is possible to store and transfer the biometric health data to various databases or portals. The major advantage of 2net platform is the increased degree of security and reliability associated with the data transfer. The cloud technologies make this platform to be universally interoperable and can be integrated to a wide range of medical applications and devices. It is extremely easy to transfer data from medical device to the 2net platform over blue tooth/wi-fi connection. Figure 1 shows the process of data transfer.

Figure 1: Transferring Data to 2net Platform

Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry™ (MCOT™)

 The Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry unit provides the patients with the facilities of continuous monitoring with the small sensors to be worn by them (CardioNet, 2012). Figure 2 shows the arrangement of equipment.

Figure 2: A patient wearing CardioNet Sensors

The patient has the facility of wearing this sensor, without disturbing his daily ...