The SAPHIRE project monitors the vital parameters of patients in clinical- and home environment settings. In the clinical environment the superior goal is to receive long term readings from the patient while allowing the patient the utmost freedom of lifestyle possible. In the home environment the rehab activity of the patient is measured.
For both environments, measurement systems are needed that are easy to handle by the patient or physician and who leave the patient with the freedom of movement that he wants.
Related requirements for the project are also given through the Personal Health Monitoring System (PHM) from the Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung in Karlsruhe, Germany. They use a wired or short range radio communication for the Body Area Network. This is the communication infrastructure for the sensors located at a central station of the patient’s body. This central station reports through wireless communication to a gateway in the patient living area and from there transmits the data to the hospital.
Similar to this communication infrastructure we will use a smaller version. All sensors we will use are already realizing Bluetooth communication interfaces. So purposely PAN is used and BAN avoided. The Hospital Pilot Application uses Bluetooth repeater, a set of access points and a rooming technology in order to give the patient the necessary freedom of movement. In the Home Pilot Application only the vital signs during the exercise will be measured. This way only the short ranges of Bluetooth communications is needed. Otherwise we also can use roaming technology to give the patient more freedom and receive measurements for a longer period.
Another goal of SAPHIRE’s interoperability platform is an alarm system. Most of the current existing projects transmit the data to a server. This server can be in a hospital where a doctor checks the data or it is connected to an alarm system. The SAPHIRE interoperability platform is a bit more “intelligent”. The analysing of the vital data will be done on its platform. So it is possible to give early warnings to the patient or directly inform the doctor about problems a patient has. For example the product EVOCARE from Dr. Hein GmbH in Nuremberg, Germany can also do cardiology exercise by data transmission to a physiotherapist or doctor. But they don’t have an automatic alarm component. Only if a physician looks through the exercise data, he can detect if there are problems due to the exercise.
Through the advantage of a alarm component in the SAPHIRE interoperability platform the patient experiences a more relaxed exercise. The whole time during the exercise, all relevant medical parameter will be measured and analyzed directly at the patient’s side. So no long time lag between the measurement and the analysis is given.
If there is data, that is out of the range of the doctor’s references, the system can give direct feedback to the patient or can react to this with new controlling parameters.
Parallel the system sends the data to the hospital, where the doctor also gets an alarm.
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