A portable medical monitoring device

• Main Author: Tan, Kelvin Wei Kiat
• Other Authors: Lau Chiew Tong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Computing methodologies::Image processing and computer vision
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59187
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The healthcare industry has gone through dynamic evolution in the recent years due to increasing demand for better and more efficient healthcare services. The monitoring and measurement of blood pressure is regarded as one of the most important clinical activity for detecting high blood pressure (hypertension) which may lead to kidney failure and cardiovascular disease such as heart failure, heart attack or stroke. However, it was observed that the conventional way of recording clinical readings on paper were generally time consuming and inefficient. Also, patients who monitor their blood pressure level at home have little or no means of communicating their readings to the general practitioners or health professionals. This paper documents the results and findings that were obtained from the studies and experiments that were conducted to explore new paradigms for monitoring medical information specifically by enabling clinical readings on digital sphygmomanometers such as the OMRON Bluetooth Blood Pressure Monitor 708-BT to be captured by mobile devices (iPhone) via the Bluetooth and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies and communicated to a clinic database via Wi-Fi or 3G for monitoring purposes.