A remote patient health monitoring system that can be installed at homes or hospitals handling isolated COVID-19 cases, which promises to spare healthcare workers from exposure to suspected or quarantined cases, has been developed.
It also reduces their need to use precious protective gear, which has become scarce. It will help generate hotspots so that authorities can contain these zones.
Defence major Bharat Electronics Ltd. (BEL) has developed this system along with the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rishikesh. The device has non-invasive sensors to measure the main parameters of the COVID-19 patient’s health — temperature, pulse rate, SPO2 (saturated oxygen level), and respiration rate. “The solution aims to significantly reduce the risk of exposure in healthcare workers. It is also expected to reduce the increasing demand of PPE (personnel protection equipment) and logistics,” BEL said on Thursday. It also said that it developed the proof of concept model of the system based on inputs given by AIIMS-Rishikesh. The public enterprise used its expertise in network-centric and IoT (Internet of Things) systems.
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The system involves a mobile app or web browser. People who show symptoms of the viral infection can get enrolled with AIIMS-Rishikesh. The hospital will assess the complaints and, if found necessary, will provide the patient a health monitoring kit to monitor his or her parameters regularly.
“Patient health parameters, along with patient location, are uploaded on a regular basis on to a centralised command and control centre on cloud using either the patient’s mobile phone or an integral GSM SIM card. The use of cloud will facilitate seamless scaling of the database of COVID-19 suspects/patients,” BEL said.
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When the health parameters exceed the threshold, an alert is sent to medical officers and healthcare workers. It will also show the severity of the patient’s condition using colour codes.