11th International Conference on Body Area Networks

Research Article

A Robust Remote Health Monitoring and Data Processing System for Rural Area with Limited Internet Access

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/eai.15-12-2016.2267661,
        author={Mohammad Pourhomayoun and Nabil Alshurafa and Foad Dabiri and Kartik Yadav and Costas Sideris and Linda Tseng and Hassan Ghasemzadeh and Adeline Nyamathi and Majid Sarrafzadeh},
        title={A Robust Remote Health Monitoring and Data Processing System for Rural Area with Limited Internet Access},
        proceedings={11th International Conference on Body Area Networks},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={BODYNETS},
        year={2017},
        month={4},
        keywords={mhealth remote health monitoring systems (rhms) body area networks remote health management aids},
        doi={10.4108/eai.15-12-2016.2267661}
    }
    
  • Mohammad Pourhomayoun
    Nabil Alshurafa
    Foad Dabiri
    Kartik Yadav
    Costas Sideris
    Linda Tseng
    Hassan Ghasemzadeh
    Adeline Nyamathi
    Majid Sarrafzadeh
    Year: 2017
    A Robust Remote Health Monitoring and Data Processing System for Rural Area with Limited Internet Access
    BODYNETS
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.15-12-2016.2267661
Mohammad Pourhomayoun1,*, Nabil Alshurafa2, Foad Dabiri3, Kartik Yadav4, Costas Sideris4, Linda Tseng5, Hassan Ghasemzadeh6, Adeline Nyamathi4, Majid Sarrafzadeh4
  • 1: California State University, Los Angeles
  • 2: northwestern University
  • 3: WANDA Inc
  • 4: UCLA
  • 5: Google
  • 6: Washington State University
*Contact email: mpourho@calstatela.edu

Abstract

Emerging technologies such as Body Sensor Networks (BSN) and Remote Health Monitoring Systems (RHMS) allow for collecting continuous data from patients, and providing clinical interventions to improve patients’ physical and mental health. Although RHMS have shown promises in reducing healthcare costs and improving quality of care, designing a robust, flexible and portable RHMS that can well handle technological and environmental restrictions such as data communication issues caused by low-quality infrastructures is by large an open problem. In this paper, we present an end-to-end, robust remote health monitoring system including body area networks for monitoring and management of patients with AIDS. The proposed system includes an Android application to be installed on mobile devices to collect data from patients and preprocess it, a wireless body area network to handle data communication and transmission, and a backend cloud-based server along coupled with NoSQL database and web-portal for data visualization and analysis. The proposed system particularly addresses a number of serious challenges in RHMS design including data transmission and synchronization in a body area network with poor network connection (e.g. in rural area). The proposed system is fully implemented and deployed in a large research study involving 600 women living with AIDS in rural area of India. The results demonstrate the effectiveness, reliability, robustness, and accuracy of the proposed system.