A mobile system for real-time patient-monitoring with integrated physiological signal processing

Praceedings of The First Joint BMESEMBS conference Serving Humanity. Advancing Technology Od 1516, '99, AM& GA. USA

A

MOBILE SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME PATIENT-MONITORING WITH

INTEGRATED PHYSIOLOGICAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

Han-Chang Wu',

Member, Chao-Hung

Lin',

Kuang-Ching Wang', Shao-Cheng Wang',

Chien-Hao Chen', Shuenn-Tsong Young", and Te-Son Kuo'.?, Senior Member

'Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University

'Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Yang-Ming University

'Graduate Institute for Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University

Abstracl

Telemedicine is a rapidly growing area and recently there are studies devoted to prehospital care of patients in

emergency cases. Here we present a GSM-network-based,

function-integrated telemonitoring system to give first aid before reaching the hospital.

Keywords: Telemedicine, GSM

Introduction

In order to provide complete management for the patient

in emergency cases, we present a GSMaetwork-based,

functionally integrated telemonitoring system to give fmt aid before reaching the hospital. The related studies point out that most of the cardiovascular or heavily wounded patients could have survived if immediate treatment were given. In our system, we acquire vital bio-signals (mcludng ECG, respiration rate, heart rate and blood pressure) and still images of the patient, send these back to the hospital to get fast consultation and take care of the patient following the on-line instructions. All of these are going on under real time criterion using the integrated device we bad developed. This system is low-cost, highly robust, easy to operate and have the potential to prevail.

Methoh

The portable device is a fully-integrated system which allows telediagnosis and teleconsultation provided by experienced physicians. The system is based on clientlserver strucme and features its GSM air interface link and collection of various vital bio-signals including ECG signals, oxygen saturation, heart rate and so on. The system also handles multimedia data such as still images, text, or graphical representation to make prescriptions as easy as possible.

We utilize the GSM data link as our air interface, The client side device gets on the GSM network to communicate with the sewer in the hospital via a notebook and a wireless modem (MI, Siemens). To ensure the reliability of the data transfer, we select the TCPfiP protocol, which performs error detection and flow control. TCP/IP is so popular that we can act as a node on the Internet and easily communicate with other nodes.

Despite the limited bandwidth in the current GSM

system, our device features real-time data transmission by efficiently compress the large amount of ECG signal. We

apply DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) to implement ow

compression scheme. The huge computation load has been taken care by a DSP processor thus we have multi-channel ECG signal and other important data as well.

Finally, we choose TMSC32OC32 DSP (Texas

Instrument) to accomplish real-time compression and

decompression. Also, the DSP-based hardware is able to collect the signals and transmit them to the notebook. Because of the amazing processing ability of DSP, we get a compression ratio of 4-10 but still satisfy the real-time criterion. The ambulance personnel are allowed to adjust the compression rate arbitrarily to tradeoff between channel traffic and signal qualitymources to different tasks of different priority.

Results

We have developed a mobile device which realizes real- time telediagnosis and teleconsultation based on GSM network. All of the vital data of patients are collected by a

DSP-based hardware, real-time compressed, and

immediately sent back to the physicians in the hospital. Bilateral connnunication is also made possible. We believe the implementation of ow system is a better way to provide a complete early management and will be helpful to rescue the patients.

References

(I) "A novel emergency telemedicine system based on

wireless communication technology

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Trans. Information Technology in Biomedicine, vol.2,no 4, pp.261-267, Dec 1998

(2) Hajime Murakami, et. AI, "Telemedicine using mobile

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(3) Marta J. Petersen, et. AI, "Telemedicine in Utah. The rural

Utah

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