Real-time and Continuous Infant Health Monitoring System

Continuous monitoring of physiological parameters for infants is necessary because
infants are very vulnerable and carmot feedback health complaints. Recent technological
advances in sensors and low-power integrated circuits have enabled the design of lowcost,
miniature, lightweight, and intelligent physiological sensor nodes. These nodes,
capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs of human
body, can be seamlessly integrated into a body network for health monitoring for infant.
These networks promise to transform health care by allowing inexpensive, continuous,
ambulatory health monitoring with almost real-time and continuous updates. The
objective of this project is to come out with the conceptual system of the Real-Time and
Continuous Wireless Infant Health Monitoring System and to translate the conceptual
system into a working physical prototype. The prototype will consist of a transmitter
node which is interfaced with temperature sensor which is placed at the infant, and a
receiver node which receives data from the transmitter node and notifY the parent or
caregiver according to the predefined situations. The scope of study for this project will
be divided into three main parts; Temperature Sensor and Microcontroller
Implementation. The author has started the project with the preliminary research in order
to gather all the information regarding the project. After that, the author proceeds to two
of the main scopes of the project, which is to design the temperature sensor and heart rate
sensor. The chosen temperature sensor to be used in the project is LM35D IC which has
the accuracy of almost ± 0.25 °C. The signal from the temperature sensor is then
amplified in order to provide better resolution and sensitivity of the analog to digital
conversion. The next part of this project is to implement a transmitter node to the
temperature sensor so that the data can be captured and transmitted almost real time to
the receiving node. Asynchronous serial data communication is used as a way to
communicate between the transmitter and receiver node.