Telemedicine system for remote blood pressure and heart rate monitoring

In this paper we present the realization of a remote blood pressure and heart rate monitoring system, based on wireless devices, capable to measure and transmit patient's arterial blood pressure and heart rate. The use of the proposed system is suitable for continuous long-time patient monitoring, as a part of a diagnostic procedure. The patient can achieve medical assistance of a chronic condition, or can be supervised during recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure. We use commercially available devices, low power microcontrollers and RF transceivers that perform the measurements and transmit them to the patient monitoring device. The patient monitoring device, in form of a PDA that running a personal heart monitor application, receives the blood pressure systolic and diastolic values and heart rate, activates the alarms when these values exceed the preset limits, and communicates periodically to the central monitoring server by using WiFi or GSM/GPRS connection. A graphical user interface running on the central monitoring server for displaying the measurements was developed. Power consumption by the used devices was also minimized.