Mobile patient monitoring: The MobiHealth system

TLDR

High‑bandwidth public wireless networks and miniaturized mobile devices have enabled new mobile healthcare services. MobiHealth offers a highly customizable vital‑sign tele‑monitoring and tele‑treatment system built on a body‑area network and a mobile health platform that leverages next‑generation public wireless networks. The system incorporates diverse medical sensors via wireless connections, transmits vital signs live to providers, provides real‑time patient feedback, and has evolved through EU and national projects with trials across Europe to evaluate its service and network infrastructure. Trials confirmed that the service and network infrastructure are suitable for mobile health applications.

Abstract

The emergence of high bandwidth public wireless networks and miniaturized personal mobile devices give rise to new mobile healthcare services. To this end, the MobiHealth system provides highly customizable vital signs tele-monitoring and tele-treatment system based on a body area network (BAN) and a mobile health care (m-health) service platform utilizing next generation public wireless networks. The developed system allows the incorporation of diverse medical sensors via wireless connections, and the live transmission of the measured vital signs to healthcare providers as well as real-time feedback to the patient. Since 2002 the system has undergone substantial development in consecutive EU and national research projects. Diverse trials with different healthcare scenarios and patient groups in different European countries have been conducted in all projects. These have been performed to test the service and the network infrastructure including its suitability for m-health applications.