Cloud integrated LPWAN system for remote monitoring of heart disease patients

Abstract

In emergency situations, heart disease patients who live in remote area with little to no accessibility for proper healthcare services are at risk of not receiving proper and/or immediate care due to issues such poor network reception and language barriers. In urban areas too, patients do not always receive the medical intervention that they need, potentially for reasons including undermining the severity of the illness in question or delays in contacting relevant medical professionals. This thesis investigates the use of a mobile-cloud system, to minimize delays in receiving medical care for heart disease patients. The proposed method to achieve this, involves the use of a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), using the Long Range (LoRa) protocol to connect several patients over a large area to a centralized server. Each patient would be provided with a Wireless Sensor Node that contains the technology to connect to a central node, as well as sensors to detect the patient heart rate and also the location of the patient. To transmit data from nodes to the server, the network does not use the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol, but rather uses its own MAC layer implementation that allows for the creation of a location based opportunistic network using LoRa nodes. Data that the central server receives will be forwarded to the cloud where it will then be analyzed in real time, and this data can be viewed on a dashboard by medical professionals. This thesis attempts to further the existing understandings of the limits of the LoRa protocol, and the impact of varying parameters of the network while also adding to the research done on opportunistic networks using the LoRa protocol. The results show that a LoRa network can be successfully utilized for such an application