Tele Health Monitoring System in Rural Areas Through Primary Health Center Using IOT for Covid-19

Biradar, V.; Sukumar, G. D.

Given the limited access to the healthcare services in India and the vulnerabilities therein, the physical well-being of the people in India is a matter of grave concern as is in other developing economies in the world. Though there has been advent of improvements in medical sciences and novel technological innovations therein, yet the reach of the same to the masses is questionable. Statistics indicate that there has been an increase in the people falling at a higher age bracket, all throughout the world. In India, the rural population embracing almost 6,40,000 villages have an unfortunate tale to narrate with more than 11% having no admittance to any sort of healthcare facilities. With the outbreak of Covid-19 and the subsequent need for far reaching screening to contain the same, there are new challenges of outreach constraints in densely populated countries like India. What further poses grave concern is the rural urban divide in the availability of healthcare amenities. All this calls for a progressive transformation and integration of medical sciences with information technology. The divide can be lessened with the aid of telehealth monitoring systems using IOT. In countries like India, where there is little access to doctors and medical infrastructure, such system would be an apt solution for interaction between the patients and the medical practitioners. Most of the villages in India are deprived of even rudimentary Public Health Centers, thus making it difficult for the resident villagers to receive even preliminary treatment. The telehealth monitoring system comes to rescue in such apathetic situations where it facilitates monitoring and measuring the physical vitals like pulse, levels of oxygen in the blood, rate of breath, glucose levels, temperature, lung capacity, ECG, and so on. The information so collected is stored in the cloud database which is then evaluated by the doctors and would eventually lead to generating prescriptions for the same and any other intervention as may be needed including emergency and EMRI services. The said project has created a website www.sfpieee.in which would help in dissemination of the information to be used by the physician. Under the call for proposals for combating Covid-19, with the support received from IEEE SIGHT/HAC and the Unnat Bharath Abhiyaan (UBA), this project has been conceptualized, designed, and implemented in Taramatipet Village of Telangana State. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.