A Scalable Telemedicine System for Real-Time Chronic Disease Patient Monitoring

The rapid evolution of mobile health technologies has significantly transformed healthcare delivery. With smart-phones, smartwatches and various specialized sensors becoming commonplace, there is now a unique opportunity to continuously gather diverse biomedical data in a seamless and unobtrusive manner, for instance, to monitor patients affected by chronic disease. Adopting telemedicine on a large-scale, however, still requires novel approaches to ensure scalability. In this paper, we present a novel telemedicine platform for monitoring patients' affected by chronic disease that aims at efficiently managing how data is uploaded based on patients' information and the current system/network status. The proposed system employs heterogeneous non-intrusive commercial devices to collect health data. Each device is programmed to adjust the data collection rate based on the status of the patient and to change the data transmission rate depending on metrics measuring the current system/network status. This ensures that data from critical patients are collected in a fine-grained manner and received by the system with priority over the others, thus allowing the clinician to monitor patients' conditions in real-time. A proof-of-concept of the proposed platform is implemented and tested. Results demonstrate that the platform is capable of adjusting the transmission rate to ensure the priority of data from patients in critical condition, even without network support.