Health-monitoring of pregnant women: Design requirements, and proposed reference architecture

Abstract

Pregnancy is a special condition in which women go through various health complications throughout the period of gestation. Conventional health monitoring systems are either too specific or too general, therefore not flexible enough to be suited for pregnant women. In this paper, requirements and challenges in health monitoring of pregnant women are summarized. First, the specific requirements for health monitoring are derived, including adaptive monitoring, need for big data, and real time monitoring. Then a first ever reference architecture is proposed specifically for health monitoring of pregnant women. Mobile devices, body sensors, cloud and thin client of health care professionals are integrated together through the proposed architecture for an end to end self adaptive health monitoring solution design. Apart from self adaptation based on system dynamics, other features of the proposed architecture are mobile device as a gateway for body and ambient sensors, risk factor evaluation and possible action identification, and prolonged monitoring. The proposed architecture facilitates big data analytic and real time monitoring by remote thin client of health professionals through the assistance of cloud infrastructure.