IoT Transforming Medical Solutions - Fetal Heartbeat Monitoring

Friday, Jul 16, 2021 by David Thoms

With the rise of IoT Devices, the healthcare sector has a district impact in two major areas. One is the environmental monitoring, ensuring the patient environment is appropriate for their condition or situation, detecting and notifying providers of any change. The other area of monitoring is patients themselves, focusing on keeping track of their condition, allowing doctors or health care professionals to monitor them remotely.

Traditionally patients were restricted to doctor visits, text message or over the phone communication with their doctors or healthcare professionals. This was the only way doctors or hospitals could monitor patients' health and progress. The Internet of Things allows for remote monitoring capabilities, empowering physicians to deliver a new level of care.The combination of LTE, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connectivity allows for a whole new level of monitoring, analysis and understanding.

Monitoring Challenges facing IoT devices

Fetal heart monitoring solution was developed for a client from the healthcare industry. This solution deals with an interesting problem of transmitting data in an effective, easy and convenient way in comparison to a more complicated process. It focuses on the patient monitoring side, rather than environmental monitoring. In the initial situation, the client's current setup presented two different methods of transmitting data to the cloud.

Method 1: AP Mode

This method transfers data from the fetal heart rate monitor to our client’s app via Wi-Fi to the Phone and then uploading the data to a designated Cloud via 4G/Wi-Fi. The issue encountered by the client when using this method was the patient was unable to access to the Internet while the app is collecting data from the fetal heart rate monitor, as the whole function was taken up with the transfer process, in addition to this there was a delay when transmitting to the cloud, meaning the data could not be transmitted right away.

Method 2: Station Mode

The second method is connecting the fetal heart rate monitors to our client’s app through a station. With this setup, pregnant women can still access the Internet even when their smartphones are connected with the monitors and the app can upload the fetal heart rate data to the cloud in real time and obtain professional medical advice. The downside is that quite a few users found the setup rather complicated. They have to pair the monitors with the app via a specific SSID and password. Overall these processes were found to be complicated, not easy to follow, slow and restricted the patients use of the smartphone.

Proposed Solution:

Utilizing GL.iNet’s networking technology we proposed an innovative work around. Within our setup we would utilize a new GL.iNet’s device with a bluetooth module, which was setup to help support the data chain.

Instead of transmitting data from the fetal heartbeat monitor to the phone, it is instead transmitted to the GL.iNet device. This device will be pre-configured to pair with the fetal heart rate monitor and no further configuration is needed by the patients. The device can then connect to the patient's smartphone via bluetooth and then transfer the data via 4G/Wi-Fi to the cloud. This is much easier and less complicated in terms of setup, and also allows the patient to still access the Internet on their smartphone while the data is transmitted in the background.

With this simple solution clients and healthcare providers can save time, reduce complexity while making this process more convenient for their patients. Please see our follow up article looking at the different variations this solution can be implemented with. If you want to find out more information about this, or other solutions provided by GL.iNet you can visit our business page or contact us at sales@gl-inet.com.