Divyashikha Sethia, Himadri Kakkar, Shantanu Jain
Abstract:
Body sensor networks can be used for healthcare monitoring of patients by expert medical doctors, in remote locations like rural areas in developing countries, and can also be used to provide medical aid to areas affected by natural disasters. An important issue to be addressed with the use of such networks is to reliably maintain the patient records. This becomes even more important and task consuming when the number of patients is large. We propose an automated healthcare architecture using NFC enabled mobile phones and patients having their patient ID on RFID tags. It utilizes NFC enabled mobile phones as control nodes to communicate medical information, and; ID cards based on contactless smartcards or RFID Tags to identify patients reliably. The NFC tag reading initiates Smartphone activity to automatically retrieve patient id, gather healthcare vital parameters from body sensors using Bluetooth, analyse the information and transmit it further to medical server for medical expert to provide monitoring and feedback. This automation of healthcare processing can help mass monitoring of patients with limited hospital resources and lack of expert medical doctors in remote areas. Reliable patient record maintenance can help avoid the errors in manual data entry and enhance the process.
Publication:
Divyashikha Sethia, Himadri Kakkar, Shantanu Jain, "Automated NFC enabled Rural Healthcare for reliable patient record maintenance" , Global Telehealth (GT2012) Conference, Sydney, November 2012