DefinePK

Abstract

Vital signs taken from the patient's body has gained significant interest among researchers studying disease diagnosis. To achieve accurate diagnoses, the performance metrics of any proposed system must be satisfied. Two essential metrics can be found in such a system; the first metric is the measurement accuracy and the second one is the power efficiency. This paper aims to introduce accurate measurements and improve the power consumption of the proposed system. This study introduced a prototype of wireless vital signs monitoring system (WVSMS) for monitoring three vital parameters (i.e. heart rate, Spo2 and temperature) of patients inside/outside hospitals. A ZigBee wireless protocol was interfaced with the Arduino Pro mini based on ATmega 328p microcontroller to alert doctors in real time via a wireless sensor network (WSN) in emergency cases when a patient’s vital signs rise to a critical level. The measurement accuracies of the heart rate, Spo2 and temperature are achieved relative to the consumer-ready devices based on statistical analyses, such as mean error, Bland-Altman and histogram. The power consumption of the WVSMS is improved by using duty cycle for the sleep/wake scheme. The experimental results revealed that the three vital parameters can be measured with high accuracy of 99.4%. In addition, the power savings of 84.5 % is achieved. Moreover, the WVSMS outperformed a similar system in terms of accuracy and power consumption.