Development and evaluation of a Python telecare system based on a Bluetooth Body Area Network

Abstract

This paper presents a prototype of a telemonitoring system, based on a BAN (Body Area Network) that is integrated by a Bluetooth (BT) pulse oximeter, a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, and a smartphone. The smartphone is the hardware platform for running a Python software that manages the Bluetooth piconet formed by the sensors. Thus the smartphone forwards the data received from the Bluetooth devices, encoded into JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), to a central server. This server provides universal access to the information of the patient's location and health status through a web application based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology. Additionally, for the described prototype, the study presents some performance analyses about several topics that are of great interest for the applicability of the prototype: (i) the technique used to forward the patient's location and health status, (ii) the power consumption of the smartphone (which is compared with the measurements of an equivalent software developed for Java Micro Edition platform), and (iii) the web browser compatibility of the web application developed for the control and monitoring of the patients. © 2011 M. J. Morn et al.