IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2021 - 60

Smart Healthcare
the measurement, his ID, date of the last vital
sign measurement and current measurements.
The device can measure heart rate, blood
oxygenation, and temperature, for this reason
there are four buttons to measure each of the
vital signs and to measure all of them. Since
there may be errors when taking measurements,
the graphical interface allows repeating the measurement
of vital signs as many times as necessary
before sending it to the server.
Each of the residents will have an RFID tag in
Figure 4. Device main menu to perform
measurements.
and the resident's ID are sent to the server via
WiFi using TCP sockets to ensure the data delivery.
Figure 3 shows the block diagram of the system
described above.
All the interfaces explained above are programmed
in C language, using Raspbian Lite as
operating system (OS).11 Raspbian Lite is based
on Debian and it is a console OS, i.e., It does not
have a graphical interface, so less system resources
are required.
Vital Signs Measurement Process
Healthcare workers would measure vital
symptoms with the device shown in Figure 1,
therefore there must be a user interface that
allows them to perform measurements and view
the results. " The device GUI (Graphic User Interface)
must be straightforward and simple to use,
without requiring extensive training. " 12 Hence,
the proposed device has a touch screen; the
main purpose of this screen is to offer a simple
interface to the health worker to verify the information
of the resident and the measurements of
the vital signs. A touch screen was chosen, since
there is an interaction with the user (healthcare
worker), he selects which measurement to perform
(input) and then, the information is displayed
(output) before being sent to the server.
The exact process is described in the following
paragraphs.
Figure 4 shows the device main menu; this
menu will show the name of the person taking
60
the form of a bracelet; these tags contain a
unique identification. The VS capturer contains
a reader to obtain the information of each resident.
However, to start the whole measurement
process and improve security, it is necessary to
enter the healthcare worker password.
Once the password is entered correctly, the
menu shown in Figure 4 will appear; with the
four buttons (bottom of the screen), the vital
sign to be measured is selected. After clicking
one of these buttons, it is required to carry out
the measurement procedure: in the case of temperature,
the device is pointed at the resident's
forehead. On the other hand, when it is pulse or
oxygenation, the resident's finger is placed on
the device (in the hole at the top of the screen).
When the measurement is finished it will be
shown on the screen, it is possible to repeat
each measurement as many times as required.
At the end of the measurements, with double tap
on the screen the data are sent to the server via
Wi-Fi.
Figure 5 shows the complete process to
measure the vital symptoms of a resident, differentiating
the automatic processes from those
performed by the worker.
Moreover, the process to register a new resident
is to write an RFID tag with their unique identification
and save their information on the server,
so the process is direct and quick to carry out.
In such a way, we are using the necessary
technologies to provide intelligent medical care
to older adults.13
Costs
Once the measurements are finished, the
information is automatically sent to a central
computer, which stores all the data, the information
is transmitted via WiFi. The fields
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