Wearable Internet of Things (IoT) Device Model Design Based on Low-Cost Healthcare Monitoring System for Current Covid-19 Disease

Abstract

IoT has become an essential resource in health applications, mainly for the monitoring of chronic diseases with integration with wearable devices, which helps to analyze symptoms in a non-invasive way, becoming a highly qualified resource for the health care of the patient. Novel Covid-19 disease emerged from China in December 2019 and became a problem of global concern the following year. Elderly and people with comorbidities are the most affected, causing a critical health condition or even death. Therefore, remote monitoring is necessary in patients with Covid-19 to avoid health complications caused by irregular conditions such as silent hypoxia. This paper proposes an efficient, low-cost, and rapidly assembled wearable IoT device model, focused on monitoring the health of the Covid-19 patients, including oxygen saturation and body temperature measurements with the aim of notifying patients and medical experts of health status during disease. Implementation is based on Espressif’s ESP32 SoC (System on a Chip) using its connectivity resources for Wi-Fi communication toward IoT platform in order to deploy physiological measurements in mobile devices and alert in case of critical values. The results of the prototype implementation are compared to commercial medical devices to demonstrate the functionality and efficiency of the wearable IoT device model.