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2015 IEEE Recent Advances in Intelligent Computational Systems (RAICS) | 10-12 December 2015 | Trivandrum

An Implementation of IoT for Healthcare


Ravi Kishore Kodali, Govinda Swamy and Boppana Lakshmi
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Warangal
WARANGAL, 506004
Email: ravikkodali@gmail.com

Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) is a computing healthcare cost effective. An efficient healthcare service
process, where each physical object is equipped with should deal with prevention, early pathology detection and
sensors, microcontrollers and transceivers for empowering homecare instead of the high-priced clinical care.
communication and is built with suitable protocol stacks which
help them interacting with each other and communicating
with the users. In IoT based healthcare, diverse distributed IoT ensures the personalisation of healthcare services by
devices aggregate, analyse and communicate real time medical maintaining digital identity for each patient. Due to non-
information to the cloud, thus making it possible to collect, availabilty of ready to access healthcare systems, many health
store and analyse the large amount of data in several new problems have been getting undetected in conventional health-
forms and activate context based alarms. This novel information
acquisition paradigm allows continuous and ubiquitous medical care systems. But pervasive, non-invasive, powerful IoT based
information access from any connected device over the Internet. systems have been helpful in monitoring and analysing the
As each one of the devices used in IoT are limited in battery patient data easily. In IoT based healthcare, various distributed
power, it is optimal to minimise the power consumption to devices gather, analyse and pass real time medical information
enhance the life of the healthcare system. This work explains to the cloud, thus making it possible to collect, store and
the implementation of an IoT based In-hospital healthcare
system using ZigBee mesh protocol. The healthcare system analyse the big data streams in several new forms and activate
implementation can periodically monitor the physiological context dependent alarms. This innovative data acquisition
parameters of the In-hospital patients. Thus, IoT empowered paradigm allows continuous and ubiquitous medical device
devices simultaneously enhance the quality of care with regular access from any connected device over the Internet.
monitoring and reduce the cost of care and actively engage in
data collection and analysis of the same. II. L ITERATURE S URVEY
Keywords - IoT, Healthcare, eHealth, ZigBee In India, a survey was conducted to observe the functioning
of different medical centers and the improvement in healthcare
I. I NTRODUCTION delivery with the introduction of information technology. The
survey revealed that patient records in many of the hospitals
Internet of Things means things interact with the Internet were not managed properly, also the patient referrals among
by employing sensors, microcontrollers and transceivers various hospitals were more or less based on paper documents.
for empowering communication and is built with suitable As facilities were not available to precisely estimate patient’s
protocol stacks which help them interacting with each history, the healthcare quality was inefficient. The survey
other and communicating with the users, thus becoming revealed that healthcare facilities can be improved with the
the constitutive part of the Internet. Nowadays, Internet is help of Information Technology, mainly using Electronic
impacting the several aspects of the potential user’s everyday Health Records (EHRs). According to the survey the usage
life. By keeping these things in view, several applications are of EHRs is less in use and prone to failures because of
developed based on IoT in which every physical object is the complexity associated with it. This paper proposed a
connected to the Internet by employing sensor devices. The simple and pragmatic Employable EHR (EEHR) [1] approach
dependency of healthcare on IoT is increasing day by day to also termed as WebEHR. This approach provides the web
enhance the access to care, strengthen the quality of care and based connectivity among various healthcare centers, thus
finally reduce the cost of care. simplifying the maintenance and sharing of data.

Depending on an individual’s unique biological, behavioural Healthcare is one of the basic needs to any person.
and cultural characteristics, the combined practice of well- However, the physicians are not transparent in terms of care
being, healthcare and patient support is defined as personalised and money with each and every patient. One more problem
healthcare. This empowers each and every individual by associated with the healthcare system is the lack of medical
following the basic healthcare principle of “the suitable care facilities to track the patient’s history to provide the effective
for the right person at the right time”, which leads to more treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to optimise the healthcare
desirable results and improvement in satisfaction thus making system to make it more efficient [2]. This paper proposes
c 2015 IEEE
978-1-4673-6670-0/15/$31.00 a cloud computing based approach for integrating all the

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hospital records from large size to small size and thereby it In the recent years, the increase in healthcare applications
can maintain the patient’s data under one roof. This approach requiring wearable technologies have been growing consid-
not only reduces the monopoly of corporate hosiptals, but erably. The medical devices available to monitor the human
also ensure that the government run healthcare facilities to be body are not comfortable to wear [9]. It gives the development
fair to the patient community. of comfortable to wear medical devices by integrating ECG,
accelerometer and SpO2 sensors in a single device.
For In-hospital patients, clinical deterioration is an Internet of Things is a computing process, in which each
important problem [3]. This paper gives the implementation physical object is associated with one or more sensors, micro-
and deployment of wireless monitoring of in-patients inside controllers and transceivers for empowering communication
the hospital premises. The deployed wireless systems gather and is built with suitable protocol stacks which help the objects
pulse and oxygen saturation measurements from patients or things interact with each other and communicate with the
regularly. It also discusses the possibility of WSNs for users, thus formng the constitutive element of the Internet [10].
healthcare in hospitals. From the perspective of key users Internet of things finds
applications like e-health, smart buildings, assisted living,
The key strength of the Indian healthcare system is due to smart metering, security surveillance, smart parking remote
its well trained medical staff. Certain efforts have been made monitoring and controlling of data [11].
to improve the quality of healthcare situation [4]. This paper Internet of things has been revolutionizing the way Internet
discusses the efforts that have been made to improve the works. In the near future billions of devices will be connected
healthcare system and the outcomes. It also provides the lack and communicate with each other without human intervention,
of medical equipment safety measures and the precautionary generating large amount of data which provides humans with
steps that need to be taken care to improve the quality of information and be able to control various devices remotely
healthcare in India. [12]. However, it suffers from two problems: limited battery
power and latencies associated.
The increase of elderly population and the wide prevalance The main objective of the IoT concept is to connect the
of various chronic diseases led to the development of tele- things information with the Internet [13]. It introduces various
health systems [5]. It gives the comprehensive understanding descriptive models for the Internet of things based on its fea-
of wearable technology for the remote healthcare system. The tures. These models are same for all Internet applications and
basic idea of this system is to implement a tele-home patient the same can be used for developing various IoT applications.
monitoring by making use of wearable devices, wireless Internet of things is termed as "Future Internet" [14]. IoT is
communication and multiple sensors. a system of connecting uniquely addressable physical objects
with the Internet. It discusses the different components of IoT,
According to the survey, majority of the road accidents its applications and key benefits to the society.
in India are due to the driver’s ill-health conditions such Wireless sensor networks can be used in many applications
as cardiac problems or any other serious health related such as precision agriculture, event monitoring, disaster man-
issues [6]. To prevent the road accidents and to provide agement, etc. WSN data can be connected to the Internet by
the driver with instant medical facility, a smart healthcare using gateways [15]. The Internet protocol (IP) is used to
monitoring system is suggested. This system measures provide the connectivity between the WSNs and the Internet.
physiological parameters such as temperature, pulse rate, etc. It presents the work pertaining to standards and solutions for
and transmit the same using smart phone to the Ineternet. WSNs, in order to make an IoT.
If any abnormal values are received from the driver, doctors ZigBee protocol is widely used in Internet of things for
and transport officers can be alerted about the driver’s location. applications such as smart home, healthcare and Industrial
automation, etc. Various wireless communication protocols
The technical improvements in low powered network such as 802.11 and Bluetooth already exist. Still these wireless
systems and medical sensors enabled the use of wireless networks are facing some basic challenges such as power
sensor networks in healthcare [7]. It gives different application consumption, scalability. ZigBee is proposed to overcome the
scenarios in healthcare and the challenges involved in WSNs, problems faced by WLAN and Bluetooth [16]. Mainly, ZigBee
with respect to healthcare and emphasizes various safeguards is used for wireless personal area networks having low data
related to the privacy of medical data and lists various rate, and can operate at low power and low cost. This low
research challenges. power consumption is mainly due to the sleep mode operation
of end devices.
M-Health combines mobile computing, medical sensors In IoT space there exist many technology based alternatives
and communication technologies [8]. It presents the different for healthcare applications. From the available solutions we
wireless technologies used in m-health such as GPRS, WLAN, need to determine the optimal way based on the constraints and
ZigBee, Bluetooth and addresses some of the challenges and priorities of the particular application [17]. It analyses struc-
future implementation issues in these areas from the healthcare tured system engineering methodolgy to build cost-effective
point of view. Health-IoT platforms that enhance the corresponding medical

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services, clinical care and remote monitoring to respond to a medical professional come by at regular intervals to actively
new challenges. engage in data collection and analysis.
The dependency of healthcare on IoT is increasing day by
III. H ARDWARE DETAILS
day to improve access to care, amplify the quality of care and
most importantly to limit the cost of care [18] . It discusses A. Intel Galileo Generation 2
the applications of IoT in personalised healthcare to achieve Intel Galileo Generation 2 board acts as gateway to process
excellent healthcare at minimum cost. This work explained the received data and it runs a web server in order to commu-
in brief how IoT functions and how it is used in conjunction nicate the data with the cloud. It is provided with 400MHz,
with wireless and sensing techniques to implement the desired 32-bit Pentium architecture based single core, single threaded
healthcare applications. Intel Quark microprocessor and supplied with a 7-15 volts
battery and consists of 256 MB of RAM. Figure 1 depicts
IoT based healthcare systems play a key role in the growth Intel Galileo Generation 2 microcontroller board and Table -I
of medical information systems. To enhance the healthcare provides features of the board.
system tracking, tracing and monitoring of patients are
essential. However, due to the inadequate healthcare situation,
medical technologies the available tools cannot meet the
same accurately [19]. In this paper mainly the role of IoT in
healthcare system, the participation of IoT between the useful
research and present realistic applications have been discussed.

Medical care is one of the many applications in which


IoT can be used [20]. It discusses the technological improve-
ments in IoT based healthcare and reviews different network
platforms, applications and industrial trends in IoT based
healthcare. Further, it also discusses the different security
issues and proposes an intelligent security model to minimise Fig. 1: Intel Galileo Generation 2 board
the security risk.
In market, there exist a number of solutions for connecting The Arduino IDE, which is running on top of the Linux
medical devices to an open network like the Internet [21]. software stack, is used to develop the required sketches called
But the problem here is how to preserve the security of programming applications for the Galileo generation 2, which
medical data. It also presents the limitations and opportunities is acting as gateway and are installed into the gateway by
of implementing IoT based eHealth services. connecting the 6 pin FTDI serial cable on Galileo to the
This paper lists various wireless communication technolo- available USB socket on the host system. To work with the
gies available for clinical environments, with each one having Galileo, FTDI drivers need to be installed. After developing
specific purpose related to mHealth and eHealth [22]. NFC is and downloading the programmed application into the Galileo,
used to check the current health status. Bluetooth is used to the sensor networks configure themselves and route the data
collect data from same room. 6LowPAN is used to check the to the gateway, which is connected to the Internet by running
status of any room in a hospital using any IPv6 device. the web server, so that remote users can access the data.
Various wearable devices such as tablets, smart phones,
watches, etc. play a key role in IoT based healthcare [23].
TABLE I: Intel Galileo Generation 2 Specifications
A wearable device based healthcare system is developed for
two applications namely firemen monitoring and sportsman Parameter Value
performance in an indoor scenario. The advantage here is this RAM 256 MB
Flash Memory 512 KB
system can be used in different application environments with
EEPROM 11 KB
minimal required modifications and the end user can interact Clock Frequency 400 MHz
with it using devices like smart phone. Supply voltage 7 to 15 V
In order to measure the physiological parameters of an In- TX current consumption 25 mA
hospital patient on a periodic basis, a health care professional RX current consumption 25 mA
is required. IoT eliminates the need for a health care pro-
fessional by providing ubiquitous monitoring system using This board supports 10/100 MB Ethernet interface to con-
sensors, gateways and cloud to analyse and store the data and nect the gateway and to the web server. USB 2.0 client port
communicate it wirelessly to medical professionals for further is connected to the host computer to program the board and
analysis [24]. Thus, IoT empowered devices simultaneously USB 2.0 host ports are used to support devices like key board
enhance the quality of care with regular monitoring and and mass storage devices. USB to 6 pin FTDI serial cable is
reduces the cost of care by putting an end to the need for used to access the Linux terminal on the host computer. Mini

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Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) socket is TABLE III: XBee Series 2 Features
provided on the bottom side of the board to attach Wi-Fi Parameter Value
cards to the board easily. It contains an AD7298 12-bit ADC Transmit Power 3 dBm
converter. This sensor node is integrated with Real Time Clock Receiver Sensitivity -96 dBm
(RTC) including an optional 3V coin cell battery to operate Indoor Range 40 m
Outdoor RF LOS Range 120 m
between the power cycles. On board reset button is used to
Firmware ZigBee mesh
reset the sketch running on the Galileo node without rebooting Analog input pins 4
the firmware. Reboot button is used to initialize the operating Digital input/output pins 11
system running on the Galileo node.
B. XB24-B XBee S2 Modules
In order to form mesh network, XBee Series 2 XB24-
B modules, which support ZigBee mesh protocol, are used.
These XBee modules are connected with temperature sensor
in order to sample the patient data using the 10- bit ADC.
ZigBee protocol operates at 2.4GHz unlicensed ISM band,
2 MHz bandwidth with 16 channels and each channel is Fig. 3: XBee adapter
separated by 5 MHz. These modules consists of microchip
EM250 from Ember Networks combines 12 MHz, XAP2b 16-
bit microcontroller and 2.4 GHZ IEEE 802.15.4 compliant RF port. After connecting the XBee modules to computer using
transceiver which is manufactured by Maxstream. The XBee an adapter, FTDI drivers need to be installed.
Series 2 modules are shown in the Figure 2. D. LM35 Temperature Sensor

Fig. 4: LM35 Temperature sensor


Fig. 2: XBee S2 sensor node
LM35 is an accurate IC temperature sensor providing its
The specifications for the XBee Series 2 modules are given output comparable with the temperature. It provides an edge
in the Table II. over linear temperature sensor calibrated in degree kelvin,
because it is not essential to deduct a particular constant
voltage from the output in order to get the celsius temperature.
The characteristics of the temperature sensor are shown in
TABLE II: XBee Series 2 Specifications Table IV.
Parameter Value
RAM 5 KB
TABLE IV: LM35 Temperature sensor specifications
Flash Memory 128 KB Sensor model LM35
EEPROM 11 KB Manufacturer Texas Instruments
Clock Frequency 400 MHz Supply Voltage 4 to 30 V
Supply voltage 2.1 to 3.6 V Accuracy ±0.5 ◦ C
TX current consumption 40 mA Operating temperature −55 ◦ C to +150 ◦ C
RX current consumption 40 mA Sensitivity 10 mV/ ◦ C
Output max current 10 mA
Table III provides the features of the XBee Series 2 modules Output impedance 0.4 Ohm
[25].
Operation
C. XBee Adapter Temperature sensor is used to estimate the hotness or
The XBee adapter is shown in Figure 3. Before using, the coldness of any body. In health care, using temperature sensor
XBee modules need to be configured with suitable parameters. data, the patient health condition can be estimated. If the
As XBee modules are made to be connected to the breadboard, temperature crosses particular threshold, the physician can be
an adapter is required to connect it to the computer’s USB alerted regarding an appropriate treatment of the paptient.

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• Basic principle to calculate Temperature:
Temperature sensor is a p-n junction diode, manufacured
with ISFET by employing CMOS technology. The for-
ward current for the p-n junction diode is represented by
equation 1
qVf
If = exp nkT (1)

The voltage drop across the p-n junction diode corre-


sponding to the temperature is given by equation 2.
When the temperature sensor is subjected to a constant
current source, the generated voltage is proportional to
temperature.
Fig. 6: Patient monitoring system
nkT
Vf = ln (If ) (2)
q
Finally the temperature measured proportional to the A. In-Hospital Patient Monitoring System
generated voltage is given by equation 3
In order to measure the physiological parameters of an
Vf In-hospital patient on a periodic basis, a health care pro-
T =q× (3) fessional is required. The IoT eliminates need for a health
nk × ln If
care professional come by at regular intervals by providing
IV. F UNCTIONING OF H EALTHCARE S YSTEM ubiquitous monitoring system using sensors, gateways and
Temperature sensors are connected to the XBee modules cloud to analyse and store the data and communicate it
using ADC pin and the temperature is sampled by 10- bit wirelessly to physicians for further analysis. A physician can
ADC according to the configured sample rate and the same access the patient’s data from any where using any Internet
is transmitted to the gateway at every 5 seconds (sample enabled device like PC, tablet or samrt phone, analyse it and
rate). These transmitted samples are collected by the gateway can prescribe an appropriate medical management. The web
through UART and required calibrations are performed to get page, which is accessed by a physician is shown in Figure
the temperature value corresponding to the transmitted ADC 6. Thus, IoT is not only enhancing the quality of care with
value. Then, this gateway runs a web server to serve this regular attention but also reduce the cost of care by putting an
temperature data to the cloud. end to the need for personnel engaged in data collection and
analysis.
The experimental set up for the IoT device is shown in
Figure 5. This set up consists of XBee module interfaced with VI. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
LM35 temperature sensor.
IoT based medical device is a combination of XBee S2
module interfaced with LM35 temperature sensor. Intel Galileo
Generation 2 board connected with another XBee S2 module
acts as gateway for the over all healthcare system. This
gatweway is used to gather, analyse, store and communicate
the medical data to the cloud over a secure connection.

VII. C ONCLUSION

IoT is a combination of various technologies that empower


a diverse range of appliances, devices and objects to interact
and communicate with each other using different networking
technologies. So far, much of the information found on the
Internet is supplied by human beings. In case of IoT smart
Fig. 5: Experimental setup for a healthcare based IoT device objects provide the information. There exist a wide variety of
applications based on IoT, including healthcare, which is the
primary focus of this work. Healthcare systems makes use of
V. H EALTHCARE A PPLICATION
interconnected smart devices to establish an IoT network for
As part of the healthcare application, IoT based In-Hospital healthcare analysis, patient monitoring and automatically iden-
patient monitoring system is implemented. tifying situations where a physician involvement is needed.

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