INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Worldwide, people living in rural and remote areas struggle to access timely, quality specialty medical care. Residents of these areas often have little or no access to substandard specialty healthcare, primarily because specialist physicians are more likely to be located in areas of concentrated population.
[1] Health care systems are now changing due to the dynamic nature of technological and scientific medical practices. The health care providers are now swiftly adopting these technologies into their health care procedures.
1.1 BACKGROUND OF STUDY
Worldwide, people living in rural and remote areas struggle to access timely, quality specialty medical care. Residents of these areas often have little or no access to substandard specialty healthcare, primarily because specialist physicians are more likely to be located in areas of concentrated population.
[1] Health care systems are now changing due to the dynamic nature of technological and scientific medical practices. The health care providers are now swiftly adopting these technologies into their health care procedures.
Because of innovations in computing and communication technologies, many elements of medical practice can be accomplished even when the patient and health care provider are geographically separated. The separation can be as small as across a town, across a state or even across the world.
Remotely monitoring patient is relatively a new area of interest which enables medical professionals to monitor a patient remotely using various Technological devices. It is primarily used for monitoring chronic diseases or specific diseases like heart diseases, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension etc. These services can provide comparable health outcomes to traditional inpatient encounters, supply greater satisfaction to patients and is cost effective.
Monitoring a patient at home or in a clinic without a resident expert using known device like blood pressure monitors, glucose meters, heart rate monitors etc. and transferring the information to a caregiver is a fast growing emerging service.
Heart beat rate means the number of heartbeats per unit time, usually expressed as beats per minute (bpm). The human heart pounds to pump oxygen rich blood to the muscles and carry cell waste products away from the tissues. Heartbeat rate can vary according to the demand of the muscles to absorb oxygen and excrete carbon dioxide changes such as during exercise or sleep. It also varies significantly between individuals based on age, fitness and genetics. This means that the heart must beat faster to deliver more oxygen rich blood. During exercise routines, the heartbeat rate gives a strong indication of how effective the exercise is to the body
[2].
Blood pressure carries a great deal of information about people's physical attributes. In recent years, blood pressure has been paid increasing attention because it is useful to indicate cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension, heart attack and asthma. Blood pressure is the pressure of blood against the walls of the arteries as the blood is circulating in the arteries
[4]. It is the driving force of pushing blood to flow in the vessels.
The history of blood pressure measurement can be traced back to the year of 1733. Stephen Hales, a British veterinarian, recorded blood pressure of animals by using brass pipes [4]. In 1896, the traditional blood pressure instrument known as a sphygmomanometer was developed by an Italian physician Scipione Riva-Rocci [4].
Systolic blood pressure (SBP) is the peak pressure in the arteries when the blood flows from the ventricles to the arteries, which occurs near the end of the cardiac cycle as the ventricles are contracting.
Diastolic blood pressure (DBP) is the minimum pressure in the arteries during ventricular diastole, which occurs near the beginning of the cardiac cycle when the ventricles are full of blood [3]. The metrical unit of blood pressure is called millimeters of mercury (mmHg). Normal blood pressure in adults is lower than 120/80mmHg [5].
As blood pressure is the power of blood flowing down the aorta and into distributing arteries, blood could not supply the whole body if blood pressure is too low. On the contrary, the vessels might be injured by the too high blood pressure, or even some ab-normities of the heart happen [6]. Some factors, such as stature, age, density of blood, posture, resistance of vessel, drugs, diet, disease, etc., could affect the blood pressure.
Moreover, it changes during the day. When one is asleep, blood pressure is lowest and it increases as one is awake. It can also change with the mood. Blood pressure is so important because it is a valuable indication of body status. Due to the high stress of the modern society, increasing numbers of people have hypertension, especially, the elderly.
It is said that hypertension happens in more than half of all Americans aged 65 years or older [7]. Hypertension, defined as the value of SBP/DBP is higher than 140/90 mmHg can cause heart attacks, strokes and other problems. Hypertension is also a major cause of disability, and it is an important risk factor for death, about 7.5 million deaths per year (13% of all deaths) [8].
Daily monitoring of blood pressure provides vital feedback to the prevention of hypertension. The daily blood pressure monitoring removes the white coat hypertension and masked hypertension problems. And it is more convenient for patients and may lead to better blood pressure control [9]. Therefore, observation of blood pressure is really essential.
Another vital thing to monitor in a patient is the heartbeat rate. It is very important that the heartbeat is to be normal. That is 72 BPM. If there is any abnormality, then the patient is in distress.
Heartbeat rate means the number of heartbeats per unit of time.
The normal heartbeat rate of a resting person is about 70 bpm for adult males and 75 bpm for adult females.
The average heartbeat per minute for active 25-year old ranges between 140-170 beats per minute while for a 60-year old it is typically between 115-140 beats per minute [17].
A patient heartbeat and blood pressure monitor using SMS.
is a radio frequency based pulse wave and body blood pressure monitoring system, which allows the control of a sick person’s condition in real time. The system monitors the heart beat and blood pressure of a patient simultaneously and if the patients heartbeat rate or blood pressure is abnormal, the system alerts sends an alert to the doctor or patient’s family members to quickly examine or diagnose the patient’s condition and take early precaution to save the patient’s life.
The alerts sound can be triggered at any time as long as there is a deviation in the health condition of the patient from the normal, such that the status of the patient can be known on time.
The system consists of a sensor, which monitors the patient and sends a signal to a microcontroller, which processes it to determine the blood pressure and heartbeat rate of the patient before sending an alert to a receiver using radio frequency.
The receiver has to be in the possession of the patient’s doctor or family members. This project can also be used by athletes who engage in physical exercise and by medical professionals. Individuals, such as athletes, cyclists or those who are interested in monitoring their heartbeat rate and blood pressure to gain maximum efficiency from their training can also benefit from this project. It can be used during physical exercise and healthcare.
1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT
The human health is one of the most important concerns in the world today.
Anything/everything becomes meaningless when one becomes sick and dies due to improper Medicare.
For health reasons, people, governments and several voluntary bodies spend a lot of money to ensure a better health condition for themselves and the entire populace. Scientists and Engineers are always at work to device a means of supporting/sustaining a sound health condition for all through the invention of numerous technologies (both Electrical/Mechanical gadgets) that are in use for health care delivery today. The heart is a very delicate organ in the human body (once it stops beating, nothing else matters).
Thus, If early actions are taken (and on time) the heart condition can be managed effectively and many patients can be cured and saved. The problem of patients slumping and dying is associated with cardiovascular arrests, hypertension, stroke etc. can be checkmated this sensitive and highly effective device (the patient heartbeat and blood pressure monitor).
There are devices in the market which can provide raw measurement data of the patients to the doctors, but the patients may not be able to interpret the medical measurement into a meaningful diagnosis due to their limited medical background.
These days it is not easy for doctors and the nurses to remain close to a patients bed side to monitor their heath condition. In the past, a huge and fixed monitoring device was used (only in the hospitals) to know the health status of a patient when on a bed.
These monitoring devices are only available in the hospitals and are constantly on the patient’s body. Many of them are not user friendly so it becomes important that the doctors and family members will have a handy device that can always monitor their patients when they are not around.
Normally it is difficult to keep track of the abnormalities in the heartbeat count of by manual means. Patients are not well versed with the manual treatments, which the doctors normally use for tracking the count of the heartbeat. Thus, there must be some kind of device which would help patients and their family member to keep track of their health by themselves.
This sole reason is why this project presents a heartbeat and blood pressure monitoring device using SMS (short message service).
The concept of developing an SMS based patient monitoring device is to have a simple home and hospital based pulse and body blood pressure monitoring device for sick person’s that are in critical condition and needs to be constantly or periodically monitored by clinician or family.
1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES
The aim of this project work is to design and construct a portable heart rate and blood pressure monitoring system with SMS alert for feedback purposes.
Specific objectives include:
• To save cost
• To increase speed of obtaining results
• To help the doctors and family members to keep track of the condition of their loved ones(patient)
• To yield greater efficiency
• To facilitate greater accuracy of results
• To ensure easy usage for uneducated ones in remote areas
1.4 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
There are various instruments available in the hospitals and market to keep track of the internal body changes, but many of them have limitations regarding to maintenance, cost, size of instruments, and mobility.
This study is so significant because it provides a mobile, small in size, cost effective, very easy to use, highly efficient performance, portable and light in weight device for use by patients themselves. It uses SMS as a feedback mechanism to help both the patient and the concerned doctor stay abreast of the patient’s conditions to take an appropriate actions when necessary.
It is beneficial in terms of cost. It saves time and is very helpful to patients who lives alone. It offers a freedom of movement to patients because of its miniature size and portability, It has a low power consumption rate To some degree, the wireless data communication via radio frequency has anti-jamming ability. It also runs DC power supply so it can be used at anywhere and anytime.
1.5 SCOPE OF THE WORK
This project is restricted to designing using the technologies and applications of blood pressure and heart rate devices as well as the relevance of the gotten measurements.it does not talk about other necessary measurements and analysis that need to be carried out on the patient.
1.6 PROJECT OUTLINE
The first chapter of this write-up is the introductory chapter, which covers the background, project objectives, scope of the project, constraints and block diagram overview of the states. Chapter 2 presents the literature review. Chapter 3 covers the system analysis and design and the design methodology. Chapter 4 presents the system implementation, which shows the component layout, the wiring schedule, the wiring diagram and the complete schematic diagram and also covers the testing and results and integration of the project design. Chapter 5 is the summary and conclusion, which includes the summary of achievements, problems encountered during project design, recommendation and suggestion for further improvement
stay updated eith us as the chapter one to five will come out soon
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