Real-time health monitoring system for sick infants– A Capstone project experience

Abstract

Caring for an infant who is sick can be stressful for the parents who have to monitor the child constantly. Furthermore, the infant is unable to let the adult know what is bothering them. Any signs of discomfort, like crying or inactivity, can be mistaken for something less serious. So there needs to be an objective system to indicate to the parents or caregiver that the condition of the child is critical. This system is useful as an alert for medical attention.With the advancement in wireless and medical sensor technology, home healthcare and remote monitoring of physiological data have gained extreme importance. The major advantage of a real-time infant monitoring system is that it continuously acquires physiological data from the infants and keeps track of their health status without requiring the parents to constantly check on their child. Another added advantage of the system is that the parents will receive an alert if the infant is not well so that they can provide appropriate medical attention, as opposed to the traditional way of finding out that the infant is really sick only when checking on the infant.This report talks about the design of a real-time infant monitoring system which is a capstone design project experience for a graduate student. The system mentioned in this paper uses a microcontroller, several biomedical sensors for sensing vital physiological data from the human body and sending them to a microcontroller such as MSP432 for processing and a wireless module such as ESP8266 that will inform the parents via an email so they can attend to their child immediately. The paper also talks about the experience and challenges the student had while undergoing the project from the brainstorming phase to successful implementation.