Design and Implementation of Web-Based Healthcare Management System for Home Healthcare

Abstract

For safe and effective home healthcare, a network system monitoring one's vital signs and evaluating one's health conditions is highly desirable. In our laboratory, we have developed a vital sensing system for home healthcare. The purpose of this study is to design and implement a prototype web-based healthcare management system (WBHMS) to make effective use of the data that are measured by the vital sensing system. In system design, we adopted a platform-independent webbased system for its easy use. Then we considered security and privacy because the personal data were handled via the Internet. Moreover, we considered that the users were able to check not only the data from the vital sensing system but also the analyzed report as feedback. From the above design specifications, we implemented a prototype WBHMS. This WBHMS consisted of a web server with Apache, an application server with Tomcat, a database server with PostgreSQL, and a web application with JAVA technologies. This web application had a data viewer function, an analysis function, and a feedback function. The data viewer function provided graphs of physiological data, which were body temperature, blood pressure, pulse wave (PW), and electrocardiograph (ECG), measured by the vital sensing system. The analysis function estimated parts of the users' health conditions by two indexes. One was pulse wave velocity reflecting arteriosclerosis and was calculated from both PW at the tips of one's finger and ECG. The other was an index reflecting autonomic nervous activity and was estimated based on power spectrum analysis of RR interval of ECG. The feedback function provided advice based on both the measurement data and the results of the analysis function. Through performance tests, we have confirmed that the prototype WBHMS has the ability to make effective use of the measurement physiological data for home healthcare.