A Wireless Emergency Telemedicine System for Patients Monitoring and Diagnosis

摘要

A healthcare system in the last decade was made possible due to the recent advances in wireless and network technologies, linked with recent advances in nanotechnologies and ubiquitous computing systems. The term telemedicine refers to the utilization of telecommunication technology for medical diagnosis, treatment, and patient care [1]. The aim of telemedicine is to provide expert-based healthcare to understaffed remote sites through modern telecommunication (wireless communications) and information technologies. One of the benefits of telemedicine is cost savings, because information is less expensive to transport than are people. Advances in medical technologies have led to accelerated growth of the elderly population in many countries, resulting in an increasing requirement for home health monitoring to ensure that elderly patients can lead independent lives [2]. Many physiological signals can be measured from individuals in their living environments during daily activities and are potentially applied to observe the deviations of health status in the early phase or to alert paramedics automatically in emergency cases [3]. Especially for remote monitoring of physiological parameters, all the studies developed and currently used in this area can be categorized by several aspects: type of sensors, type of data communication, monitoring device, and signal processing/medical algorithms [4]. So these aspects along with recent studies will be discussed in this section. As shown in Figure 1 the main telemedicine system components in recent years include biosignal sensors, processing units, data communication networks, and medical service center.