Medical Sensor Platform: HealthMon

Our increasingly digital and interconnected world is allowing us the great opportunity to collect exorbitant amounts of data about the environment surrounding us. But what about ourselves? Right now, we have ways of collecting personal health data remotely, but it relies on the healthcare provider determining and assigning the device to the patient. We also already have devices that can collect health information for the user, but there is no way to safely and reliably share it with our healthcare providers. In this case, the ability to transmit the user’s collected health data to a central location, and the ability to choose to share it with doctors is a key differentiating factor. This is said without a regard to the cost of the monitoring system to the one being monitored. To answer this problem, we have developed a general-purpose, wearable piece of technology to monitor people’s health that will be in-reach of everyone. Using an Arduino with sensor modules, and sending over the Bluetooth protocol to a Raspberry Pi allows us to develop an extensible, modular, and low-cost system, allowing others to extend the platform in new and innovative ways, while keeping the overall system affordable. The two largest challenges will be: securing the patient’s personal health information and ensuring this is a safe and reliable system for patients/users to use. This includes securing the data in-flight and at rest, ensuring data privacy, ensuring data authenticity, and protecting the user from potentially malicious cyberattacks. Other challenges of this system are choosing components appropriate for this use-case, inter-compatibility of these components, and battery life. To this end, we developed a low-cost general-purpose system where health information is collected at the source, the person, and is transmitted to a central processing location. By deliberately developing this device to be low-cost, we intend to help bring the low-cost IoT world that has been progressing to human health.