Body sensor networks in fetal monitoring with NFC enabled Android devices

Abstract

As many areas of the medical field are becoming more and more interested in telemedicine and outpatient care, we focused on obstetrics and the monitoring of fetal health as an area of medicine that could benefit greatly from body sensor network (BSN) technology. In this paper, we explore some of the hardware sensor interface challenges involved with condensing the fetal monitoring procedure into a portable system, specifically for a system integration with a smartphone. There are two contributions of our hardware interface with an Android-based smartphone: i) using IOIO hardware board to prototype an universal interface to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hospital-graded medical devices, ii) using Google's Near Field Communication (NFC) Android devices for initiating our monitoring mobile application and secure interface hardware devices and a backend hospital information system (HIS). We demonstrated this prototype that could integrate with current existing medical monitoring devices and capture BSN information in a seamless manner without cumbersome initialization processes. Also, it reduced the risk that applications can accidentally be initialized and corrupted HIS unintentionally. As a result, the system can be potentially used by a remote monitoring setup without a presence of a medical profession, and even streamline in-patient monitoring process with actual precision for the medical measurements.