Microcontroller-Based Design and Development of a Real-Time Body Temperature and Heart Rate Monitoring System

Abstract

Healthcare is an important need of the human population. Heart rate and body temperature are some of the critical parameters that are routinely measured whenever a patient arrives in hospital. The ability to monitor the two parameters ensures that proper healthcare is delivered early. Most health monitoring systems presently in use only work in offline mode and therefore critical that a system is developed to enable for the real time remote monitoring of the patient. In addition, numerous challenges still exist in healthcare services. These include prolonged time of examination of patients by the medical professionals, conventional patient data retrieval, and the cable media use of the medical equipment’s used. We therefore propose a heart rate and body temperature monitoring system based on a microcontroller to alert health care professionals when these values are abnormal. This study aims at relieving the burden of medical professionals in monitoring the patient, improving the efficiency in taking patient data and minimizing the risk of misdiagnosis. The system will enable real time remote monitoring. To realize this, a prototype system is developed to analyze the behavior of the heart rate and body temperature of several patients. The prototype consists of the MLX90614 temperature sensor and the XD-58C photoplethysmography sensor that measure body temperature and heart rate of a patient, respectively; and controlled by the Arduino mega 2560 microcontroller board. The XD-58C sensor counts the heart rate for specific interval of time and estimates the beats per minute while the MLX90614 sensor measures the body temperature. Both data are sent to the Arduino microcontroller for analysis and transmission to the receiver. A wireless system is used to transmit the measured data to a remote location. Finally, the data is displayed on a Liquid Crystal Diode screen and computer at the receiving end for further processing and patient care. The study findings revealed a strong positive correlation between the prototype, the clinical thermometer and sphygmomanometer methods in measuring body temperature and heart rate respectively for all the four patients. The bias which represents the systematic error in the measurement was found to be within the medically predetermined a priori conditions of ±0.5°C and ±5 BPM for all cases under consideration. This confirmed that the prototype and gold standard methods used in measuring body temperature and heart rate were in agreement. As a result, the prototype can replace alternative methods of measurement in monitoring the two vital signs.