Research Article
A Data Collection and Communication Module for Telemedicine and mHealth Systems
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.bodynets.2014.257018, author={Peter Blank and Patrick Kugler and Dominik Schuldhaus and Bjoern M. Eskofier}, title={A Data Collection and Communication Module for Telemedicine and mHealth Systems}, proceedings={9th International Conference on Body Area Networks}, publisher={ICST}, proceedings_a={BODYNETS}, year={2014}, month={11}, keywords={telemedicine mhealth wearable sensors usb gsm/gprs beaglebone microcontroller data acquisition and transmission autonomous embedded computing}, doi={10.4108/icst.bodynets.2014.257018} }- Peter Blank
Patrick Kugler
Dominik Schuldhaus
Bjoern M. Eskofier
Year: 2014
A Data Collection and Communication Module for Telemedicine and mHealth Systems
BODYNETS
ACM
DOI: 10.4108/icst.bodynets.2014.257018
Abstract
Wearable body sensors have become an important basis for today's medical and fitness applications. To assist athletes or to take care of elderly people in everyday life situations, sensor data can be collected and processed to give helpful feedback. However, the data collection process of multiple or different sensor systems still had to be done manually by the user or an expert, which usually takes a lot of time and can lead to errors. This paper presents an embedded data collection and communication module based on an AT90USB microcontroller, which can automatically acquire data from various wired and wireless sensors (e.g. via USB or Bluetooth). The obtained data can be cached, preprocessed and transmitted to a specified central server using LAN, Wi-Fi or GMS/GPRS. Through unified expansion slots, additional communication devices and a BeagleBone embedded can be extended to handle many different sensor systems. Moreover, wired sensors can be charged through appropriate circuits. This data collection and communication module operates without any input settings and special knowledge by the user. Five prototypes with different configurations and extension units concerning communication interfaces and computation power have been built up. The evaluation of the transfer reliability with 100%, whereupon 98% of data could be transmitted at once and the remaining 2% with the next attempt, confirms the stability of data transmission.
