Communication Protocol for Enabling Continuous Monitoring of Elderly People through Near Field Communications

Abstract

Continuous and wireless transmission of vital signs for personalized healthcare is gaining a great deal of interest from Ambient Assisted Living solutions. Personalized healthcare capabilities are limited to the patient data available, which is usually dynamic and incomplete. For that reason, regular monitoring of patients with the aim of offering a suitable analysis of patient evolution is required. Continuous monitoring requires the integration of wireless communication technologies and embedded systems into wearable and portable monitoring systems. In addition, a user interface intuitive is also required, which is easy to use and understand by the patients and caregivers. This work proposes a solution such as Near Field Communication (NFC) for personalized healthcare based on the Internet of Things. NFC is a technology integrated in smart phones that provides capabilities for identification of devices/sensors, and presents ubiquitous communication capabilities between the sensor and the device. NFC also presents challenges in terms of the performance and efficiency of data transmission, due to the constrained resources and capabilities of ubiquitous devices and the latency introduced by the NFC technology. These challenges are intrinsic to NFC since it was originally considered only for simple identification and not for continuous data transmission. In this context, this paper presents a novel monitoring system for continuous data transmission from a set of clinical devices based on NFC which has been optimized in order to make communications feasible. This novel monitoring system is also composed by a set of participatory sensing applications to support caregivers and for patients to self-monitor and self-manage their health status wirelessly. A technical evaluation based on latencies associated with use of NFC for continuous monitoring and an evaluation of usability by a group of elderly users and their caregivers, which studies the interactions between the users and the system, are demonstrated.