IoT-based smart tracking of body temperature for healthcare

Remote health care for patients at home or in hospitals from newborn babies to the elderly is increasing due to the popularity of various developed mobile devices. The Internet of things (IoT) and the mobile technologies make it easier to monitor the patients’ health conditions by sharing their information with health care teams such as doctors, nurses, and specialists.

In the 21st century, we want to relate to anything, anytime, and anywhere. IoT is being adopted around the globe in a variety of industries. The core component of this hyper-connected society is IoT, also referred to as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication.

MosChip has designed an IoT-based hardware and software for healthcare systems which support the healthcare personnel and caretakers to monitor their patients’ health conditions via the Internet remotely.

Regularly high or low body temperature at a particular duration of time or an event affects our body function which then affects daily routines, creates health issues, causing a change in medication with the help of a doctor resulting in a loss of good health, time, and money. For example, the bacterial infection can cause the body temperature to fluctuate. In fact, it’s one of the most common causes of change in the body temperature. Since viruses and bacteria have a hard time surviving at temperatures higher than the normal body temperature, the body detects a bacterial infection, it involuntarily increases its temperature and increases blood flow to speed up the body’s immune system to fight the infection. It’s not uncommon for the body to raise its body temperature as much as 3 to 5°F to fight off an infection. Because elevated body temperature also causes harm to the body, we don’t want to let prolonged high temperatures go untreated.

Low body temperature (regular trend)	High body temperature (regular trend)
Addison’s Disease	Sweating
Diabetes	Chills and shivering
Drug/alcohol abuse	Headache
Hypothyroidism	Muscle aches
Infection	Loss of appetite
Kidney failure	Irritability
Liver failure	Dehydration
Sepsis	General weakness
Side effects of medications	Unusual skin rash, especially if the rash rapidly worsens
Shock	Unusual sensitivity to bright light
Fast Breathing/Asthma	Stiff neck and pain when you bend your head forward
Cancer	Mental confusion
Stress	Persistent vomiting
Insomnia	Difficulty breathing or chest pain

Bluetooth capabilities can connect to the everchanging smartphones available. It is a low-power technology with a wireless media interfaced with a temperature sensor. The device is compact and handy (refer to Figure 1 below), and it works on a 3.3V battery cell.

How does the system work?

The temperature patch is connected to the location of the body to ensure the accurate temperature. The data is collected from a sensor at a period interval of time and sent to the smartphone over Bluetooth 4.0. The smart application designed for iOS and Android platforms will perform a data analysis and send real-time data to the specific cloud application through over a GPRS/Wi-Fi backbone (Refer figure 2).

The concerned doctor can analyze the data and suggest medication in real-time. Based on the temperature vs. the time graph, the diseases are easily recognized. The application includes health reports for remote diagnosis, alarm onset temperature limit, schedule alerts to take medicine, and scheduled doctor visits.