Design and Implementation of GPRS Based Telemedicine System for Remote Patient Monitoring

Telemedicine system enables patient monitoring by medical experts remotely. As in society due to improved healthcare the percentage of elderly population is increasing and in general people are becoming more health conscience, approach of telemedicine and remote health examinations can prove to be convenient, cost effective and ubiquitous. Telemedicine depends mainly on two technologies viz. bio-sensors and information and communication (ICT). Recent advancements in these domains have made implementation of telemedicine convenient and affordable. This paper presents design and implementation of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) based telemedicine system for remote monitoring of patients. The motivation for this work is to take advantage of commonly available off-the-shelf technologies like GPRS and internet used by general mass for remote patient monitoring. The system implemented consists of two sections, a remote transmitter and a central monitoring server. Transmitter is designed using ARM7 based 32-bit microcontroller LPC2148 and a GSM/GPRS modem. TCP/IP socket developed in MATLAB is used at the receiver end. The implementation is successfully verified by communicating ECG signals generated from a MATLAB based ECG simulator.