Primary Health Diagnosis Kit for Emergency Medical Situations

Sidharth Kakar
Masters in Mechanical Engineering
San Jose State University

Sri Harsha Kunda

Masters in Mechanical Engineering
San Jose State University

1. Abstract
Every year there are 32.4 million heart attacks and strokes that lead to 14 million deaths [1]. The value of
time in medical emergencies is very critical. Speed is life and death. Today in the world there are around
10,500 different types of medical devices on the market [2]. There are certain challenges accessing these
medical devices for proper health care system implementation in many countries. A few of them are
affordability, importing of the equipment from other countries, lack of capacity like storage, electric power
supply, skilled health personnel, difficulties in getting spare parts and poor maintenance.
Our goal is to design a portable health monitoring system kit. When we came up with this idea, we truly do
not know which health problem to be addressed on the first priority. When we did our research heart strokes
are one of the major concern. Even in developed countries like USA some state lack ECG (Electro Cardio
Diagram) machines in their emergency vehicles for immediate heart stroke symptoms identification [3].
After all the googling and talking with few people from medicine, health services and knowing especially
about the current situations in my country India, we came up with this portable Primary Health Diagnosis
Kit for Emergency Medical Situations. The whole system is integrated into a small box which is of a
typical IPhone 6 Plus length and breadth in dimensions.

2. Concept
The idea of this system is to implement it with help of governments and NGOs such that they give this kit
to every EMT vehicles. The space required for this kit is very less as it is portable. Due to its internet
connectivity not only the EMTs monitor the patient, the doctor/specialist monitors the patient health
virtually at a distant place and provide required special instructions for the EMT. Now imagine the potential
of such a system in under developed or developed countries, where a doctor can see the data in USA and
provide special instructions about the patient in India. Another application is that; this system can be
extended to monitor a patients health during an operation. The specialist can check the data on the website
in other country and provide instructions to the doctor who is operating at a different place.
Developing a bio-medical device for health monitoring system involves lot of work on electronics and
precision sensors. With scalable technology today micro-computers are available on the market as low as
$54(USD). We are using Raspberry Pi B+ microprocessor for developing this concept. It has 1GB of Ram
and external ports to connect to Ethernet or external storage space as large as 1TB. A generalized list of
hardware requirement and software details are explained in this section to present an idea for the judges
panel about our concept.
2.1 Hardware Requirement
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Micro processing Unit (Raspberry Pi B+)

Microcontroller (Arduino Uno)
Wi-Fi Chip (ESP8266-12E)
Pulse Sensor
ECG Sensor

6. Airflow Sensor
7. Temperature Sensor
2.2 Software Requirement
1. Arduino IDE
2. Processing (Data Analysis Visualization+ UI)
Figure 1. explains how the system comes into play. A detailed description of the implementation is
presented in next section.

Hospital Access Through

Website

Microprocessor+IoT
connector

Data Uploading through

Internet

Health Monitoring
Web-Portal

Breath Analyzer

Body
Temperature
Sensor
Data+
Visual
Processing

ECG

BPM

Fig 1. Conceptual idea of the system

Wi-Fi Access Point

Local Computer in Hospital

Raspberry Pi
Pulse Sensor

Temperature
Sensor

ECG Sensor
Arduino

Respiratory
Sensor

Fig 2. Prototype Conceptual Diagram

3. Implementation
a.
b.
c.
d.

911 or any other emergency service receives a call about heart stroke
An ambulance reaches to the locality
Patient is picked up into the ambulance and EMT starts to attach all the sensors on patients body
Sensor data flows into the microcontroller (Arduino) where the software comes into play and
communicates with raspberry pi to store the data
e. Pre-written code analyzes the data and starts sending it into Microprocessor (Raspberry Pi)
f. Microprocessor does the number crunching and data processing using processing language
g. Data is visualized on the screen attached to micro-processor
h. In the mean while ESP8266 wifi chip starts uploading the data over internet through wifi into a
data base
i. This data will be displayed dynamically over a web portal (ex: www.healthmon123.com) where
the doctor can see before the patient is rushed to the emergency ward and makes necessary
arrangements.

j.

Extra peripherals like defibrillator can be attached to the equipment. Once the patients heart rate
goes down the nominal rate, the electrodes will start passing the high voltage into the patients body
to keep the heart pumping.

4. Conclusion
Implementing such a system in developing and under-developed countries will help people to have a
better life. A doctor can virtually check the patients data dynamically every second and give
instructions to the operator in situations where the doctor/specialist is not available immediately.
The whole system needs barely a 7.4 V 2000 mah Lithium battery for powering the system (system
time is not yet determined). We already started working on the hardware integration process at San Jose
State University with other graduate students. So far we successfully integrated the pulse sensor. We
are able to get the data and visually plot the Beats per Minutes accurately. We would like to make this
system as precise as possible in the next two months in our prototype phase and give a demonstration
at various institutes.

5. References
1. How the internet of things may help save heart attack and stroke victims?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ptc/2014/08/05/how-the-internet-of-things-may-help-save-heartattack-and-stroke-victims/
2. Global forum to improve developing country access to medical devices
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2010/medical_devices_20100908/en/
3. Allowing EMTs to perform an ECG should not be controversial
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/01/allowing-emts-perform-ecg-controversial.html