It will be possible in the near future for doctors to monitor the heart rate or check the blood pressure of a patient hundreds of kilometres away, using wireless sensors and mobile phone technology with the help of a cloud-based health care monitoring system.
A research team at Charles Sturt University, led by Dr Tanveer Zia, is designing the communication pathways to allow health information collected by a network of tiny wireless sensors to be transmitted using smart phones or tablet computers.
The information would be sent to a secure internet cloud storage so that health professionals and carers can access the data regardless of their location.
“The aim is to provide a cost effective and efficient health care service to Australia’s ageing population, especially in rural and regional areas,” said Dr Zia.
“Internationally there’s a lot of work to develop small, low cost, networked sensors to replace the current bulky medical devices,” he said.
“What makes our research innovative is that we are using existing telecommunications infrastructure, in this case the 3G network to make the data available over longer distances which will be placed on a secure cloud-based platform to enable medical practitioners to access data from anywhere.
“This study will contribute significantly in further advancing research in wireless sensor networks, cloud computing and security in wireless communication from health care perspectives.”
Dr Zia and his team have already tested collecting the data and transferring it to an android phone, with the next step being to develop a web-based platform to store the information.
Dr Zia said he also hopes to develop a real-time alert system to warn of significant changes in a patient’s health.
“For example if an elderly person in a remote area had a fall, the mobile device would send an alert to the doctor, carer and emergency services,” he said.
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