This full-text paper was peer-reviewed and accepted to be presented at the IEEE WiSPNET 2017 conference.
HEMAN: Health Monitoring and Nous
An IoT based e-Health Care System for Remote Telemedicine
Chanchal Raj,1 Chaman Jain2 and Wasim Arif3
Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Silchar Assam, India
Email: 1 craj.nits@gmail.com 2 chamanjain.nits@gmail.com 3 arif.ece.nits@gmail.com
Abstract—Any country with Social, technological and economi-
cal advancement needs enhanced healthcare system. Telemedicine
healthcare system provides the provision of medical treat-
ment from a remote distance. The telemedicine research and
product development has embarked prodigious growth during
the past decade primarily due to tremendous technological ad-
vancement in ICT and automation. The aim of IoT-based health
care system is to ensure and increase the welfare of patients and
the quality of life in rural areas. In this paper we present a low
cost Health sensor platform for rural health monitoring with
a well-structured and secure interface between medical experts
and Remote centers for sharing of important medical parameters.
In our proposed and implemented model we developed separate
interface for medical experts and remote Centre’s and introduced
a new algorithm for implementation. Features like live video
streaming, chat boxes, automatic prescription generation and
push notification are included. The prototype is used for trial
under the supervision of medical experts and the data are
compared with standard test done in pathological laboratory.
The result is satisfactory with good level of acceptance.
Index Terms—e-health, Telemedicine, LabVIEW, IoT.
I. I NTRODUCTION
With India being the seventh largest country on the globe
with an area of about 32 lakh square kilometers consisting of
29 states and 7 Union Territories governed by a syndicated
system. Proper and systematic healthcare for India’s rural and
remote population is a challenge for the health department of
the country. Even today 75% [1] of the medical practitioners
practice in urban areas for better infrastructure whereas 70%
of India’s population are suffering from poor rural healthcare
infrastructure.
Telemedicine/Tele-health, is of great communal apposite-
ness to the nation for empowering expertise Healthcare to the
underprivileged population of remote area. E-healthcare is an
adequate key for providing expertise healthcare to the remote
area patients at reduced cost and easy access to overcome the
issue of doctor isolation from remote area. The gap between
patients at rural area and the medical practitioner at urban area
has been effectively reduced. LabVIEW embraces extended
assistance for interfacing to sensors, instruments and various
devices. LabVIEW consists of front panel and block diagram.
Front panel is used for design of front end and block diagram
consists of all backend design with the help of graphical
coding. Hardware can be easily accessed through LabVIEW
by serial UART or Ethernet communication.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Various research field emphasize on delivering remote e-
healthcare services with the help of wireless and portable
978-1-5090-4442-9/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE 2115
sensors with recent advancements in Information and commu-
nication technologies. An attempt to monitor elderly people’s
health profile in their own home with help of wireless sensor
technology and electronic devices is described in [2]. A remote
e-healthcare system using a medical care provider instrument
that reciprocally supervises the patient’s health position by
querying the patient queries instantaneously and receiving
replies to those queries, is represented in [3]. Communication
made available using telephone line for centralized monitoring
station that receives data from many remote patient and allow
medical treatment remotely is proposed in [4], [5]. Implements
a uniform architecture for amalgamating conventional medical
systems in the field of telemedicine systems with the help
of smart health devices and hospital information systems.
Adaptive e-Healthcare data management for structural imple-
mentation shows solution for serving medical facility at remote
locations outside of the premises of conventional medical
institution is presented in [6], [7]. Implements an e-healthcare
system which aims at collecting blood glucose and blood
pressure parameter for various patients that uses smartphones
and web services for front end.
III. I NTERNET OF T HINGS FOR H EALTHCARE
IoT is a buzzword which is guessed as one of the promising
technology driver for automation and control in the industry.
It has extensively been researched over the past couple of
years. IoT implemented health monitoring system for rural
areas has tremendous leverage over conventional healthcare
system. The cost of medical healthcare is rising and even
higher for chronic diseases which leaves a percussion on the
arete of people’s life [8]. The population of elderly people is
increasing continuously, which makes an impact on medical
facilities or services. [9]. Various advantages of IoT can be
seen in the healthcare sector in the form of wearable devices
and medical applications [10]. Hospitals use IoT to monitor
the location of medical devices, personnel and patients. An
IoT based e-Healthcare system lets medical practitioner carry
information with them anywhere they go through apps on their
mobile devices [11].
IV. P ROBLEM S TATEMENT
Any healthcare system designed for remote monitoring
must ensure continuous data analysis to support the patient
efficiently with provision of maximum diagnostic data through
sensors. Remote telemedicine not only reduces the round
trip visit to doctors but also helps in emergency incidents.
 This full-text paper was peer-reviewed and accepted to be presented at the IEEE WiSPNET 2017 conference.

In proposed model the bio-signal data are collected using

an embedded hardware architecture and the same is made
available in cloud infrastructure for rural areas with limited
or zero Internet connectivity. The proposed model stores the
data locally in proper format to be used at a later stage.
All different sensors provide data in different format which
is unstructured, which is challenging to manipulate, store and
understand. Therefore, there is a demand of complex and
hybrid database management system (DBMS).
V. P ROPOSED M ETHOD
In this paper, the above proclaimed issues have been in-
scribed by the proposed IoT based e-healthcare telemedicine
system for detection and estimation of general health profile
of a patient. Our proposed methodology is based on a remote
e-health telemedicine system consisting of a portable sensing
unit comprising of Pulse Oximeter, ECG, EMG, GSR, Body
temperature and blood pressure that is assigned with the work
of acquainting various medical data along with images of eye, Fig. 1. Hardware interface.
tongue and area of impact of the patient’s body, following
a desired sampling rate specified for the parameters. The unit
enables a video communication between a patient and medical
practitioner and also has the features of storing and processing
the sensed data locally for storage and diagnosis of the patient.
The system is capable of working in both online and offline
modes so that it can be used efficiently in limited Internet
connected areas.
A. Hardware Interface
Proposed system consists of AVR Atmega 328P, Arduino
shield, Body Temperature, Pulse Oximeter, ECG, GSR, EMG,
Blood Pressure, Camera module. This microcontroller has
14 pin GPIO, USB port. Blood Pressure (manufactured by
Omron) gives serial output at 9600 baud rate [12] with
Diastolic pressure, Systolic pressure and Pulse reading as
output. Blood pressure with relaxed heart corresponds to
Diastolic pressure whereas blood pressure when contracted
corresponds to Systolic pressure. Pulse rate is determined in
the format of heart beats per second. Pulse oximeter is used to Fig. 2. DAQ system for data collection.
measure Oxygen saturation and Pulse rate. The serial output
common channel with help of sensor node unique identifica-
is set at 9600 symbol per second. Blood oxygen saturation
tion string name and the required number of samples instead
level (SpO2) is an estimation of the instantaneous oxygen level
of conventional data acquisition system where each sensor
present in the hemoglobin. SpO2 is denoted as a fraction (in
node require separate channel. The system flowchart of DAQ
percentage) of the greatest measure of oxygen that hemoglobin
is illustrated in Fig. 2.
in the blood can carry. ECG, EMG and GSR are connected
This is an event driven process where at the same time from
to ADC of microcontroller and samples are taken at desired
all sensors data acquisition is not required. Instead, data is
interval according to sensor specification at baud rate of 9600.
captured on occurrence of some specific events and stored. The
The integrated system is connected to a computing device with
sampling rate of sensor acquisition mainly depend on sensor
Intel i3 processor with Windows XP and above. LabVIEW is
specification.
used for data acquisition and processing. It is also used for
Advantages of DAQ
front end design. For storage purpose Amazon AWS is used
• Use of single USB channel for all sensor data acquisition.
and for syncing an application is developed on Google script
• Data sampling rate only depend on sensor and not on
platform. The developed hardware interface is shown in Fig. 1.
computer interface.
B. Data Acquisition from Sensors • Seamless data acquisition from sensor to software
E-Healthcare system needs to record distinct types of sensor Interface.
data. The proposed system inherits the sensors data through a • It restricts the serial buffer to overflow.

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 This full-text paper was peer-reviewed and accepted to be presented at the IEEE WiSPNET 2017 conference.

Fig. 3. Design flow.

After the data acquisition from sensors is completed the

locally stored data is processed using Signal Processing and
Bio-medical toolkit of LabVIEW R which may help the med-
ical practitioner to evaluate the data in quantitative manner.
C. Work Flow of the Proposed System
In the proposed method after acquiring the data from
sensors it is stored in our local database and for syncing the
database with the cloud storage a sync application is developed
which works on Google spreadsheet script based database.
The proposed sync application is responsible for data transfer
from local database to cloud storage whenever proper Internet
Connection is available. In offline mode the application stores
the data in its local repository (see Fig. 3).
Features of the proposed sync application:
• Works on slow Internet Connectivity.
• Data Acquisition can be done without Internet.
• Data is efficiently placed in repository.
• Efficient use of space in cloud data storage.
• Structured form of data.
• Data redundancy is reduced.
• Uniformity is maintained across all system users.
The data stored in cloud is accessed by the medical practi-
tioner referred by the remote center and data is available for
treatment in respective formats such as text, image, waveform,
and audio/video. All medical parameters are then verified by
the referred medical practitioner and AV calls may be made
to the remote center on demand. After successful verification
prescribed document or feedback report is generated and are
made available to patient/remote center with unique reference
id for individuals. The unique id and login access may be
used by the patient for reference at any time from anyplace.
The flow chart of working principle of the proposed model is
shown in Fig. 4.
D. Software Interface
We design the front/home screen with three type of login
access for Doctor, Remote Center and Admin. The Admin
stays at the top of the hierarchy with features like add/remove
of doctor or remote center. It is responsible for issuing of
user-id and password for the other two interface.
Fig. 4. Working principle of proposed method.
Remote center is responsible for enrollment of the patient
and it generates a unique reference id for each pa-
tient based on combination of timestamp and center id
(YYMMDDHHMMSS-< Remote center id>) which is unique
and given to the patient for future reference by email and SMS
gateway. After enrollment basic details like Name, Age, and
Height etc. are stored and data acquisition dialog box pops
up for acquiring data from different sensors, symptoms and
images, The remote center has the liberty to chat or do a
AV communication with the medical practitioner on demand.
Remote center has access to all previous patients’ record
with their prescription, enrolled at their remote centers (see
Figs. 5 and 6).
Doctor Interface has a list of patients which are referred by
the remote center. The interface displays all relevant sensor
data of a particular patient in order. Medical practitioner may
be live online or offline and hence the proposed model offers
live session and offline session. The sensor data are streamed
during online session whereas the data are stored in proper
format for offline sessions. Standard signal processing toolkits
are used to provide some additional graphical analysis of some
of the received sensing data to help medical practitioners in
diagnosis.

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Fig. 5. Snapshots of software (symptoms, ECG analysis, DAQ window, home window in right to left order).

TABLE I
C OMPARISON TABLE .

Parameters Proposed system Pathological value % Error

67 65 3.07
ECG HR 63 65 3.07
76 77 1.29
98/75 99/71 1.01/5.63
Pulse Oximeter
99/80 98/82 1.02/2.43
(SPO2/Pulse)
96/62 96/65 0.00/4.61
124/86 122/85 1.60/1.17
Blood Pressure
Fig. 6. Web interface. 117/80 117/81 0.00/1.23
(Sys/Dia) mmHg
129/92 127/93 1.57/1.07
96.7 99.2 2.52
Body Temperature
99.8 100.2 0.39
The Patient has a dedicated web portal where patient can (in ◦ F)
100.1 100.9 0.79
get medical report along with doctor feedback by unique
patient reference id which is generated during enrollment at
remote center are made available at their registered email and made available. Data analysis of some of the signals are also
Mobile number. Prescription contains report of all tested pa- made. Inclusion of other sensors and further data analysis is
rameters along with doctor’s suggestion and list of prescribed kept for future work.
medicines.
VI. R ESULTS R EFERENCES
The proposed system is tested under the supervision of [1] About 70 per cent indians live in rural areas: Census report [Online].
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VII. C ONCLUSION Patent 6, 168, 563, issued Jan. 2, 2001.
[4] B. Avitall, B. Peterson, J. Kletch, E. B. Griswold, and P. Moran, “Remote
The paper is mainly focused on building a common interface health monitoring system,” U.S. Patent 6, 171, 237, issued Jan. 9, 2001.
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model we have dealt with embedded system platform, ICT and pp. 385–390.
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