PRESENT-DAY PATENT- A PREVIEW

Technology is transforming each and every aspect of life and healthcare is not an exception. In fact, remote and continuous tracking of health has become a necessity for various reasons such as: (i) Monitoring the health of bed-ridden or weak elderly people at home; (ii) Incessant monitoring of people with chronic ailments to prevent any fatal happening; (iii) Self-monitoring and preventing any disease, prior to its occurrence; (iv) Rendering medical advice and prescriptions to people in remote areas with no adequate hospital facilities; (v) Reduce frequent hospital visits, which might be expensive and sometimes unnecessary and (vi) Reduce burden on healthcare professionals, enabling them to spent their valid time only to patients needing urgent care. The very same motives have been achieved by a recent invention from a group of five inventors from Jadavpur University, West Bengal, India. The invention actually worked with two main units, namely the local monitoring unit and the remote monitoring unit. Actually, the local monitoring unit encompassed nine of the body parameters sensing modules. Subsequently, a processor processes these sensing modules’ outputs and does three tasks: (i) Stores them in a memory unit for further processing; (ii) Displays them on a local display unit; (iii) Sends them to a transmission module, so as to enable a remote device in the remote monitoring unit to access the patient parameters from a central cloud server. The added advantage of their system was that it involved a lightweight cipher method with three-factor authentication approach to ensure security robustness against network threats. However, IoT-based healthcare monitoring systems with a greater number of sensing modules and facilities for improved diagnosis or prognosis in reduced time and/or cost with zero network threats is always anticipated in the impending years. Image courtesy: www.freepik.com