BioSenHealth 1.

0: A Novel Internet
of Medical Things (IoMT)-Based Patient
Health Monitoring System

Anand Nayyar, Vikram Puri and Nhu Gia Nguyen

Abstract Twenty-first century has marked developments in the area of

microelectronics, sensors, material science, VLSI, Internet of Things (IoT), and many
others which have led to significant developments in the area of agriculture, mili-
tary, medicine, space, industrial production, and even day-to-day routine activities.
Medical technology among all these has seen drastic changes in terms of technology
for the patient’s treatment. Intelligent health monitoring systems are regarded as the
need of hour for accurate and responsive monitoring of a patient’s health in diverse
situations like injured soldiers in battlefield action, pregnant women, heart patients,
and cancer patients. Current advancements in biosensor technology have led to the
development of various health monitoring systems, but these systems have some
limitations in terms of cost, accuracy, and portability. The objective of this paper is
to propose an Intelligent IoMT-based health monitoring system, i.e., BioSenHealth
1.0. BioSenHealth 1.0 is working prototype for monitoring real-time vital statistics
of patients in terms of body oxygen level, pulse rate/heart rate, and body temperature
and sends the live data to doctors via thingspeak.com. The device is fully tested on
50+ live patients in various nursing homes-cum-hospitals, and the accuracy measured
is more than 90% as compared to existing health monitoring systems. BioSenHealth
1.0 showed significant improvements in terms of low cost, accuracy, portability, as
well as fast response time in real-time operations.

Keywords Biosensors · Sensor network · Health monitoring systems · DS18B20

Pulse sensor · Oximetry sensor · IoT—Internet of things · BioSenHealth 1.0
Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)

A. Nayyar (B) · N. G. Nguyen

Graduate School, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, Vietnam
e-mail: anandnayyar@duytan.edu.vn
N. G. Nguyen
e-mail: nguyengianhu@duytan.edu.vn
V. Puri
R&D Center of Virtualization and Simulation, Duy Tan University, Da Nang, Vietnam
e-mail: purivikram@duytan.edu.vn

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 155

S. Bhattacharyya et al. (eds.), International Conference on Innovative Computing
and Communications, Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems 55,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2324-9_16
156 A. Nayyar et al.

1 Introduction

In the twenty-first century, varied technological advancements in wireless communi-

cations, microelectronics design and integration, miniaturization, sensors, and Inter-
net of Things (IoT) have revolutionized the entire scenario of healthcare services
being developed and deployed in medical care units, hospitals, field military camps,
and even mobile hospitals.
Smart biosensor-based body sensor network systems provide various healthcare
facilities like medical monitoring, remote health tracking and even provide health
alerts to doctors via Internet and mobile SMS at regular intervals of time and are
more advantageous in terms of response time, accuracy, and cost.
Biosensor-based health monitoring systems [1] allow the patients not only to be
limited to bed, but also they can freely move around up to specific distance from the
bedside monitor. Today, smart care health monitoring systems have gone to the next
level of becoming the complete autonomous and portable biosensor healthcare kits
making the patient’s health monitoring possible anywhere and everywhere without
any hiccups and are so portable that even layman can operate so accurately that
almost 95% doctors around the world start the initial patient’s treatment based on
the readings given by these biosensor healthcare kits.
In traditional pedagogies of medical treatments, patients were not accurately
treated by doctors using manual methodologies. So, there was an urgent requirement
of some device for regular tracking of heart beat, oxygen level, and body temperature
of the patient. Even with wider availability of various devices, every device has some
limitations in terms of heavy cost, size of instruments, and mobility. To overcome
this limitation, a device was required with the unique requirements of less weight,
portability, and small size to enable intelligent health monitoring.
In this research paper, we focus on the design and development of a working
prototype of biosensor-based smart health monitoring system—BioSenHealth 1.0.
The prototype proposed comprises of oximetry sensor, pulse rate sensor, and body
temperature and is IoT (Internet of Things) enabled and tested on more than 50
patients (live subjects) in hospitals for real-time monitoring. The working prototype
will enable doctor using the equipment to remotely monitor health via Internet any-
time, and the accuracy achieved in the prototype is more than 90% as compared to
other expensive, heavy biosensor kits currently deployed in hospitals.
Organization of Paper
Section 2 covers the background of biosensor-based health monitoring system.
Section 3 describes biosensor and working of biosensor-based system. Section 4
describes BioSenHealth 1.0 overview, components used (hardware and software),
and detailed circuit description. Section 5 provides detailed working of prototype of
BioSenHealth 1.0 and results. Section 6 concludes the paper with future scope.
BioSenHealth 1.0: A Novel Internet of Medical Things … 157

2 Background

There exist various scenarios in the healthcare field where a patient or group of
patients require constant and even remote monitoring for number of particular health
conditions. For example, pregnant women require regular monitoring of health like
heart rate, oxygen level, pulse monitoring for regular track of vital statistics, bodily
functions for any sort of suspected condition at early time for better treatment. Such
monitoring and testing is highly labor-intensive with the additional requirement of
specialized medical staff. Monitoring devices which are widely known and adapted
by various medical care units for monitoring a patient’s health are hard-wired and
less portable and require patients to be kept bedside for accurate and timely mon-
itoring. Moreover, an exercise of this sort takes vital space and even out of reach
for lots of patients due to high cost. The mass wire connections sometimes become
confusing and complicated for medical staff to care for and to administer in certain
procedures. Lots of researches have been performed by researchers for integration
of biosensors in smart health monitoring making it cheap, portable, autonomous,
accurate, and away from hiccups of administration. Furthermore, the technologies
have been proposed for biosensors which can be used even in homes without needing
any medical specialist and require less hiccups for wearing and readings.
Recently, biosensor-based kits are also integrated with IoT making the data
remotely available to doctors via internet making healthcare systems even more
sophisticated.

3 Biosensor—Definition and Its Working

3.1 Introduction and History

In recent years, the trend has shifted to development of varied modern techniques
in industrial applications. In this relation, biosensors [2, 3] have huge potential and
overcome all limitations of conventional methods. Biosensors, talking in general
terms [4], are small-cum-smart devices based on direct spatial coupling between a
biologically active compound and a signal transducer with electronic amplifier. The
concept of biosensor [5] was started in 1962 with the discovery of enzyme electrodes
by Leland C. Clark and has brought such a revolution that researchers from diverse
fields like physics, chemistry, VLSI, embedded systems, material science, and others
have come together to develop highly sophisticated and efficient bio sensing devices
for applications like robotics, health monitoring, biology, smart homes, military,
agriculture, industry, and many more.
What exactly is Biosensor?

Biosensor  Bio-Element + Sensor Element

158 A. Nayyar et al.

Fig. 1 Working of bio sensor

Figure 1 illustrates the working of biosensor.

The term “Bio” element (e.g., enzyme) basically recognizes a specific analyte, and
the term “Sensor” is used to convert the data from biological module to an electrical
signal. The bio element is highly specific for the analyte and is very sensitive to
analysis and does not recognize any other analyte.
Depending on their utilization in real-world applications, the biosensors are of
diverse types: immunosensors, magnetic biosensors, thermal biosensors, piezoelec-
tric biosensors, optical biosensors, ion-sensitive FET biosensors, and many more.
Advantages of Biosensor
1. Real-Time Monitoring: In lieu of healthcare systems when integrated with
biosensors, the systems enable doctors to proactively monitor and manage the
health of patients with live data at all times.
2. Sophisticated System Organization and Component Aggregation: Biosensor-
based system frameworks provide efficient aggregation of systems and subsys-
tems, network and devices and present them all in one interface which makes the
complex tasks of monitoring simple and without any hiccups.
3. Unified Visibility: Unified visibility of entire system, including devices,
machines, and network, enables managers to have complete insight about the
health and status and enables to locate all sorts of risks and immediate action.
4. Diverse Applications Applicability: Biosensors these days are used heavily in
military, agriculture, hospitals, and other areas, and researchers around the world
are working constantly to improve the scope of biosensors’ applicability.

4 BioSenHealth 1.0: IoMT (Internet of Medical

Things)-Based Health Monitoring System

4.1 Definition

BioSenHealth 1.0 is regarded as Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-based health

monitoring system for measuring various pedagogies of the patient’s health like body
temperature, pulse rate (heart rate), and oxygen level. BioSenHealth 1.0 integrates
the modern concept of IoT in which doctors can keep track of the patient’s health via
BioSenHealth 1.0: A Novel Internet of Medical Things … 159

Internet in real time. BioSenHealth 1.0 is equipped with smart biosensors and is based
on an Arduino Mega 2560. The concept of “Plug-Play-Sense” makes BioSenHealth
1.0 intelligent as it can be used even by layman via just plug-in the sensors to the
patient’s body and capture the real-time data over an Internet-enabled device. The
device is relatively cheap, lightweight, accurate, and highly responsive as compared
to other biosensor kits available in the market.

4.2 Components

The components that make up BioSenHealth 1.0: intelligent health monitoring sys-
tem is as follows:

4.2.1 Hardware Components [6]

1. Arduino Mega 2560

Arduino Mega 2560 is designed for developing an Arduino-based robots and doing
3D printing technology-based research.
Technical Specifications: Based on ATmega2560, it consists of 54 digital
input/output pins, 16 analog inputs, 4 Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Trans-
mitter (UART) and can simply connect to PC via USB port.
2. ESP8266
The ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module is a Software on Chip integrated with TCP/IP protocol
stack to enable any microcontroller to access Wi-Fi network.
Technical Specifications: 802.11b/g/n; Wi-Fi Direct, 1 MB flash memory, SDIO
1.1/2.0, SPI, UART.
3. DS18B20—body temperature sensor
The DS18B20 temperature sensor provides Celsius temperature measurements with
9–12-bit precision. The DS18B20 has 64-bit serial code which allows multiple
DS18B20s to function on same 1-wire bus.
Technical Specifications: Unique 1-wire interface; it measures temperature from
−55 to +125 °C.
4. Oximetry sensor
Oximetry sensor when attached to the patient’s finger gives analog output based on
heart rate pulse. The analog output is being connected to microcontroller with an
ADC pin to measure the BPM.
Technical Specifications: +5 V DC operating voltage, 100 mA operating current,
660 nm Super Red LED, and Photo Diode-Detector.
160 A. Nayyar et al.

5. Pulse sensor
The pulse sensor is a plug-and-play sensor for Arduino for measuring heart rate.
Technical Specifications: 5v operating voltage, Green LED as transmitter, optical
receiver.
6. LCD 16*2
A 16*2 LCD is an electronic display module very popularly used with a wide range
of applications.

4.2.2 Software Components [7]

1. Arduino IDE Environment

Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the platform independent
base for Arduino hardware and can run on multiple operating system platforms.
Arduino IDE is a strong platform for all researchers, programmers, and other industry
project development professionals to develop projects on Arduino controllers and
other sensors.
2. MATLAB
MATLAB is regarded as a multi-functional computing environment and fourth-
generation programming language and allows matrix manipulations, plotting of data,
algorithm implementation, interface creations, and developing programs in varied
languages liked C, C++, C#, Java, Fortran, and Python.
3. IoT-Based Web Services—thingspeak.com
thingspeak.com is an open-source IoT application and API to store and retrieve data
from sensors via the HTTP protocol over the Internet. It is fully compatible with
Arduino, Raspberry Pi, biosensors, and many more.
Circuit Diagram
Figure 2 describes the actual working circuit of BioSenHealth 1.0-Internet of
Medical Things (IoMT)-based heath monitoring system proposed in this paper.
Explanation
In this circuit diagram, Arduino Mega 2560 is connected to oximetry sensor, pulse
sensor, and body temperature sensor. Arduino Mega 2560 takes input from body
temperature sensor and pulse rate sensor and displays the data on 16X2 LCD. Body
temperature sensor also sends data to thingspeak.com via ESP8266. Oximetry sensor
displays data on MATLAB via serial communication. 16X2 LCD pins RS, EN, D4,
D5, D6, D7 are connected to pins 51, 49, 47, 45, 43, 41, respectively. Oximetry
sensor data pin connects to analog pin A0. The body temperature sensor is based
on one-wire protocol and sends data through Arduino Mega 2560 Pin 3. Pulse rate
sensor connects to Arduino digital Pin 5. ESP8266 uses software serial library and
connects to Pin 10 and Pin 11.
BioSenHealth 1.0: A Novel Internet of Medical Things … 161

Fig. 2 BioSenHealth 1.0 prototype: circuit description

Fig. 3 Animated view

5 Working Prototype and Results—BioSenHealth 1.0

Intelligent Health Monitoring System

In this section, BioSenHealth 1.0 for monitoring health of the patient is discussed.
Figure 3 demonstrates the working of BioSenHealth 1.0: IoMT-based patient
health monitoring system.
Figures 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 show the complete details of BioSenHealth 1.0.
162 A. Nayyar et al.

Fig. 4 a BioSenHealth 1.0—working prototype. b Pulse rate: heart rate sensor—live monitoring
of heart beat

Fig. 5 a Live monitoring of heart beat of patient. b Oximetry sensor

Fig. 6 a DS18B20 body temperature sensor. b Live temperature monitoring on BioSenHealth 1.0
kit of patient body temperature

6 Conclusion and Future Scope

Conclusion
This research paper which presents BioSenHealth 1.0: IoMT-based health monitoring
system for measuring heart beat, pulse rate, and oxygen level of patient is being
proposed. Systems like BioSenHealth 1.0 monitor real-time values of vital body
signs of patient in an affordable manner. Systems like this will bring a dynamic
BioSenHealth 1.0: A Novel Internet of Medical Things … 163

Fig. 7 a Live graphs of patient’s oxygen level in BioSenHealth 1.0. b Live graphs analysis of
patient over DSO—live oxygen level via oximetry sensor

Fig. 8 Live temperature of

patient over
IoT—thingspeak.com

shift in the way people think about and manage their health and will lay a strong
foundation for doctors to have accuracy in determining the pre-health of also reduce
primary medical costs.
Future Scope
In the near future, more accurate sensors will be integrated in the prototype version
2.0, all sensors will be IoT compliant, and the prototype will be integrated to mobile
app to send real-time alerts to doctors regarding any vital signs of the patient’s health
in fast response time.

Acknowledgements This research was supported for practical orientations by Dr. Sanchi Sharma.
We thank Dr. Sanchi Sharma for letting us test BioSenHealth 1.0 in her clinic to be used on real-
patients for health monitoring. We thank patients for providing us feedback regarding the device
developed by us that greatly improvised our research toward IoMT-based technology development.
164 A. Nayyar et al.

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