The Research And Implementation Of An Integrated Framework For Home Healthcare Delivery

With the increasing demands of rising medical costs in combination with a boomin elderly patients in need of quality patient care medical practices are being stressed.Patient to nurse ratios are increasing and government spending in the medical domainis at an all-time high threatening the futures of government medical programs such asMedicare and Medicaid.All of these factors lead us to the conclusion that the best solution to this problemmust involve the use of technology to ease the burdens and workloads of doctors andcaregivers. This integration must allow doctors and caregivers to provide healthcare toat least the same number of patients they are currently seeing while improving thequality care provided as well as boosting patient confidence and freedom.In this thesis we propose a framework for the monitoring of a patient’s vitalstatistics in a home-based setting using a mobile smart device. We believe that intaking advantage of the wireless sensor technology which is readily available todaywe can provide a solution that is both economically and socially viable offering asolid quality of healthcare in a comfortable and familiar environment. Our frameworkexposes both802.11and Bluetooth wireless protocol transmitting medical sensordevices using an Android platform device as a monitoring hub. This thesis hasprovided a solution in the form of a remote patient monitoring and data aggregationsystem. A complete end-to-end architecture and implementation has been presentedwhich can ease the burdens of large doctor to patient ratios by giving the patient morecontrol over their individual medical data and monitoring. This allows the patient agreater degree of liberty and freedom from continual doctors visits for routinecheck-ups to monitor common vital statistics such as pulse rates, blood-glucose, andweight differentials. This also allows the doctor to manage a high volume of patientswithout degrading the level of care provided to the individual. In this thesis we haveprovided a generic communications protocol layer between sensor devices and themonitoring hub that allows data transmission independent of the underlying wireless protocols and standards, a mobile Android platform based monitoring hub application,a back-end to support data persistence, a web portal for visual data examination, analert system customizable at the individual device level, and an open design to allowintegration with disparate medical storage systems such as EMR, EHR, and PHRsystems.