This was a project that my team and I developed during the EPSC-IMIBIC Biotech Hackathon. In it several doctors from the Reina Sofia Hospital in Cordoba posed several challenges and the teams proposed and developed an IoT solution during 3 weeks.
Our challenge was entitled "Bracelet for telemonitoring the condition of psychiatric patients". To contextualize the challenge, let's put ourselves in the situation where the Mental Health Unit is going to discharge a patient is going to discharge a patient who has suffered several critical and even dangerous episodes. episodes. This situation poses the problem that during the next 10 to 15 days (until the next appointment with the patient) we have no way to We have no way of having constant two-way communication beyond phone calls. beyond phone calls. The solution we propose is based on making available to the patients, and to the healthcare staff staff in their care, an immediate, easy and agile means of communication that allows them to have the that link that patients need to feel so much without the need to use a mobile device or the Internet. mobile device or the Internet.
Our device allows patients to send through its 4 side buttons one of the following events:
- I am following the intended plan.
- Something went wrong with the plan (I am not taking the treatment, I am not getting help from my environment).
- I am afraid something is going to happen.
- I am in danger, I need help.
These events can be consulted by the healthcare personnel in charge of this patient, as well as additional data such as the day, time and location where the button was pressed. The physician will be able to program alarms that will be sent to the device and will make it vibrate to ask the patient to report his or her condition.
Emergency notification criteria can also be configured for each patient. These notifications can be customized to be triggered by a certain event, at a certain time of day or even if the patient is detected to be in a potentially dangerous place (near bridges, rivers, high-speed roads or train tracks).
Our device has been developed with the following technologies:
- For the physical device we have used: GPS module, adafruit board, m0 with a Lorawan communication module, buttons, leds and a vibration motor. The GPS module communicates with the Adafruit board through the i2C communication protocol. Everything is powered by a 1000 mAh battery.
- For communication we make use of the Lorawan protocol, commonly used in sensors and IoT devices. This protocol allows transmitting few data packets at low frequency, with a low energy cost and without using the internet or an intermediary device.
- The reception, processing and storage of the data has been done with Amazon Web Services Cloud technologies connected to The Things Network platform that receives the data from the Gateways to which the device is connected.
- The web application for the healthcare staff has also been made with AWS services. Specifically Amplify to serve the web (html, css and js), API Gateway to configure the APIs and Lambda to access and process the information taken from the databases.
- For the potentially dangerous places detection service we have used Lambda, where the OpenStreetMap Overpass public API is queried, which gives us information about the different elements that are near a given location.
Some use cases would be:
- The danger button is pressed near a railroad track at 1:00. The physician has previously configured the notifications to reach a department in charge of monitoring the alerts. Thanks to PULSE, this department will have access to the patient's location, be able to act and potentially save a life.
- The patient has been pressing the "Something went wrong with the plan" button for several days in a row. The attending healthcare staff notices this and moves up the check-up appointment.
- The caregiver knows that on certain days of the week, during a specific time slot, the patient is very lonely. You can set alarms on those days at those times. By vibrating you communicate to the patient that you want to know how he/she is doing.
