Monitoring Self-isolation Patient of COVID-19 with Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) application can be used in health care service to monitor patients remotely. During the COVID-19 pandemic, infected people with no symptoms must isolate theirself to keep the virus from spreading. Medical devices connected to internet can be used for physiological measurement such as heart rates, blood oxygen saturation and body temperature and send the measurement result to a server. Remote monitoring can also reduce patient visit to hospital and therefore reduce workload of medical staff. In this research we propose a monitoring system for COVID-19 patients in self-isolation to monitor physiological data like SpO2 and heart rate together with location information of the patients. We have developed IoT-based health monitoring system with wireless body sensor networks and a gateway that can be used for data acquisition and transmission. The system also employed an application server that can be used for data storage, analytics, and visualization. The prototype of the monitoring system used home pulse oximeter for measuring SpO2 and heart rate and an Android application working as IoT gateway to collect data from sensor and adding location information before sending the data to server. In server, an open source Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana (ELK) stack popular for logging and indexing large data continuously process incoming data so that medical staff can explore and visualize measurement results of patients and their location in a dashboard. That way they can monitor patient's condition trying to recover themselves in self-isolation at any time and take preventive actions as necessary.