Long-Range Patient Monitoring

The incidence of chronic disease has soared in recent years. Around 60% of US adults have at least one chronic condition, and two-thirds of those have multiple. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has proven a highly-effective tool for healthcare providers to manage outcomes in chronic disease patients. However, current RPM solutions rely on reliable wireless connectivity, which has still yet to reach many regions even in the U.S. — some 42 million Americans still do not have access to broadband Internet.

Working in the Engaged IoT Lab at Cornell, I developed a wireless backhaul platform based on long-range radio (LoRa), to bridge connectivity gaps between a local hospital and patients living in areas without broadband access. I designed the platform to be compatible with off-the-shelf patient monitoring devices from various manufacturers, and to send out the data in a standard header format. The data is delivered to a receiving station at the hospital, which then uploads it to a local SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) server. SFTP is a simple protocol, and an SFTP server is easy to set up on any hospital data system.

This way, off-the-shelf patient monitoring devices can be easily interfaced with hospitals’ existing data management systems without any dependence on manufacturer-specific protocols or local wireless infrastructure. The initial proof-of-concept was demonstrated with two Raspberry Pis, two off-the-shelf 915MHz radio modules, and a custom-designed Pi HAT. The system was able to upload measurements from an off-the-shelf blood glucose monitor to an SFTP server at the local hospital.