AUTOMATIC DATA TRANSFER USING SMS AND ITS …€¦ · The vitals which are sent via SMS and GSM network should be backed up for future references. For this purpose, a database to

http://www.iaeme.com/IJEET/index.asp 273 [email protected]

International Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology (IJEET)

Volume 11, Issue 3, May-June 2020, pp. 273-284, Article ID: IJEET_11_03_031

Available online at http://www.iaeme.com/IJEET/issues.asp?JType=IJEET&VType=11&IType=3

ISSN Print: 0976-6545 and ISSN Online: 0976-6553

Journal Impact Factor (2020): 10.1935 (Calculated by GISI) www.jifactor.com

© IAEME Publication

AUTOMATIC DATA TRANSFER USING SMS

AND ITS APPLICATION IN TELEHEALTH

TECHNOLOGIES

Shanmugasundaram M

Professor, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamilnadu, India

K.V.N.D Sai Sujit, Aditya V.V.S and P Jaswanth Reddy

Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamilnadu, India

ABSTRACT

Health is the primary concern of every human being. With the advancements in

technology, its applications in enhancing the medical industry (telehealth) brought the

two worlds closer. The rural parts of the country till date, are not equipped with

excellent medical facilities and functional mobile data connectivity. WiFi facilities are

available only in select few places. This paper discusses the development of a

prototype where the vitals of the patient (temperature, pulse, and ECG) are detected

and stored in a database and ThingSpeak cloud. The prototype also provides image

processing techniques on digital X-Ray images to help the doctors in diagnosing the

patients more efficiently.

Key words: Vitals, Automatic detection, Raspberry Pi, GSM network, Bulk

messaging service, SMS, Database, Image processing, segmentation, thresholding,

body temperature, ECG, pulse rate, database, ThingSpeak, Android Studio.

Cite this Article: Shanmugasundaram M, K.V.N.D Sai Sujit, Aditya V.V.S and

P Jaswanth Reddy, Automatic Data Transfer using SMS and its Application in

Telehealth Technologies, International Journal of Electrical Engineering and

Technology, 11(3), 2020, pp. 273-284.

http://www.iaeme.com/IJEET/issues.asp?JType=IJEET&VType=11&IType=3

1. INTRODUCTION

The advancements in technology have brought the two worlds of technology and medicine a

lot closer by aiding the doctors in treating and monitoring patients efficiently and quickly than

observed in the past.

The onset of WiFi, mobile data, and enhanced network connectivity have brought the

world much closer. Yet we find in some parts of the country, most importantly rural areas,

there exist poor mobile data connectivity and improper medical facilities.

This is causing a problem in establishing correspondence within the hospitals between the

patients and the doctors and nurses.

Shanmugasundaram M, K.V.N.D Sai Sujit, Aditya V.V.S and P Jaswanth Reddy


The development of a prototype to address this issue should be introduced for

development to reduce the problem of poor communication.

The main goal of this project is to develop a low cost, low power, reliable monitoring

system that analyses the data from sensors which measures the important vitals of a patient. If

the vitals drop into the critical condition, an automatic message consisting of the vitals will be

sent to the doctor’s and the nurses’ phone attending to the patient. A database is created to

store the details of the doctors, nurses and the patients’ along with the patient’s vitals updated

automatically at regular intervals in the database.

Our project involves the estimation and monitoring of the vitals like body temperature,

pulse rate, and ECG. This paper is chosen as a base paper and talks about the important

parameters required to monitor a patient’s condition. The prototype in the paper detected the

vitals and they were sent using WiFi to devices connected only in that network. [1]

The main challenge was the building a more robust prototype which is essential to send

the vitals without completely depending on the Internet and push the boundaries of its

connectivity. One such method is using the GSM network and sending messages using SMS

technology [2].

Since our objective deals with the application of technology in the field of medicine, i.e.,

Telemedicine/Telehealth, the prototype can be incorporated with various other applications to

serve its objective. Also, sending the vitals using only the internet cannot be implemented

successfully in areas where mobile data and WiFi facilities are not abundantly available. This

combined into our main objective in building such a prototype that can be used in areas where

mobile data connectivity and WiFi facilities are not abundantly available.

The heartbeat is the most important vital when it comes to determining the condition of

the patient. [3,7] helps in understanding the heartbeat sensor.

To understand the advantages of telemedicine in enhancing medical facilities is essential

to proceed with our prototype model. [6] talks about the advantages of telemedicine, keeping

in mind the current scenario of medical facilities that are prevalent.

The vitals which are sent via SMS and GSM network should be backed up for future

references. For this purpose, a database to store the vitals of the patient, the patient details,

and the details of the doctors and nurses attending to the patient is necessary to avoid any

discrepancies in the future. Generally, a hospital has a database to store such information. [5]

talks about automatic vital detection and pinging an ambulance service. But there is no

backup to store both the patient details, the vitals details and the ambulance details, which

makes it a matter to attend to.

Our prototype has in itself incorporated different applications of technology in medicine,

i.e., telemedicine. Hence, the prototype has to be very robust to manage and handle such

applications. A simple Arduino board does not have the facilities to fulfill all the requirements

for our prototype. Hence, we need a much more robust board. [9,11] talks about the

advantages the Raspberry Pi module possesses over other boards. A Raspberry Pi module

comes equipped with WiFi and Bluetooth facilities. Understanding the GSM network

architecture is essential to be able to achieve correspondence between the bulk messaging

service API and the mobile phone. [10] Provides detailed architecture on GSM technology

which is needed to understand the concept of SMS messaging, Bulk SMS service which is

incorporated in our project and SMSCs.

Our project also involves a software simulation in MATLAB, which uses image

processing techniques on digital X-Ray images. [12] talks about the various image processing

and segmentation techniques. These processes are necessary to accurately segment a part of

the image, in our case, the area of discomfort faced by the patient which will help the doctor

Automatic Data Transfer using SMS and its Application in Telehealth Technologies


in providing a more accurate diagnosis. The segmentation techniques like edge detection and

thresholding have given insight into using the correct technique to achieve our result.

In healthcare monitoring systems, the important vitals which are used to determine the

condition of the patient are Temperature, Pulse Rate, and ECG. When the number of patients

increase, it becomes difficult for the doctors to monitor every patient under his jurisdiction.

There are times where the doctor is not alerted in cases of emergencies, despite 24 hrs

monitoring. Therefore, it makes it essential for the need of a system where the doctors can be

alerted automatically when a patient goes into a critical state. This prototype is designed in a

way where the communication between the patient’s vitals monitoring system and the doctors

and nurses’ mobile phones depends on simple and robust SMS mode of communication.

2. PROPOSED METHOD & METHODOLOGY

This prototype uses a Raspberry Pi module to connect and configure all the sensors associated

with the prototype which are DHT11 temperature sensor, pulse rate sensor and ECG sensor.

The vitals of the patient which are body temperature, pulse rate and ECG are measured

continuously by the sensors and if the vitals fall into the critical condition, an automatic

message is sent to the registered mobile numbers (the doctor and the nurse) so that they get

alerted about the patient’s condition and take the necessary and immediate actions.

A database is created in Raspberry Pi using SQLite and Python. The database is essential

to store the details of the doctor and nurses attending the patient, the patient details, and the

patient vitals for backup and future reference. The patient’s vitals get automatically updated in

the database and they can be retrieved anytime with an SQL query. A database is essential as

it also avoids any unfortunate repercussions in the future. The data of the vitals and patient’s

and doctor’s information is also stored in the ThingSpeak cloud.

An Android application is also built where the patient’s vitals can be viewed when the

doctor is connected to the same WiFi as the Raspberry Pi. The doctor can view the patient’s

vitals by entering the patient ID in the app.

Since our objective involves using technology to enhance medical facilities, we are

applying the concepts of image processing to enhance the visualisation of the digital x-ray

images. The digital x-ray image is processed in such a way that the part about the discomfort

for the patient is only highlighted and the surrounding areas are blackened. This will help the

doctor to visualise and diagnose the area of pain efficiently.

3. HARDWARE DESIGN

3.1. Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a small single-board computer, and like any other computer uses an

operating system. The OS used in Raspberry Pi is Raspbian, a Linux distribution Debian-

based OS. Debian is an OS which uses the Linux kernel and is composed of free and open-



source software. The Raspberry Pi 3 model uses the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC with a 1.2

GHz, 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor and onboard 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth

and USB capabilities. The RPi features 40-pin general-purpose I/O pins (GPIOs).

3.2. Pulse Rate Sensor

The pulse rate sensor is used to determine the pulse of the patient. It has two surfaces. On one

side, it has an Ambient Light sensor with an LED and on the other, it has circuitry that is

responsible for the noise cancellation and amplification of the received stimulus. The LED

should be placed on the vein of the fingertip or ear tip directly to record the pulse. There will

be a flow of blood through the veins when the heart is pumping.

3.3. DHT11 Sensor

The DHT11 is a temperature and humidity sensor. It consists of a thermistor to measure the

temperature and a capacitive humidity element. The capacitor consists of two electrodes and a

moisture-holding substrate which acts as a dielectric between the two electrodes. The change

in the capacitive values depends on the difference in the moisture and humidity between the

two electrodes.



The DHT11 is small in size, with an operating voltage of 3 to 5 volts. It consists of a

negative temperature coefficient element where the resistance value decreases with an

increase in the temperature.

3.4. ECG Sensor

The ECG sensor is used to measure the heart rate of the patient and plot its Electrocardiogram

graph. The model uses the AD8232 module along with electrode pads to measure the ECG of

the patient.

The electrode pads colour code in the ECG module:

Electrode pads are connected according to the colour code convention above with the

AD8232 module to record the electrical activity of the heart. The AD8232 sensor is used for

signal conditioning in ECG. The primary purpose of this chip is to amplify, extract and filter

the signals which are small and noisy.

3.5. MCP3008 ADC IC

The MCP3008 ADC IC is an Analog-to-Digital Converter.



The MCP 3008 is a low-cost 8-channel 10-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter. The precision

of this ADC is similar to that of the Arduino UNO. The MCP3008 connects to the Raspberry

Pi using a serial SPI connection. To establish correspondence with the MCP3008, any four of

the GPIO pins, or hardware SPI bus or software SPI can be used. SPI uses separate clock and

data lines, along with a select line, to choose the device to establish correspondence with the

small peripherals.

3.6. GSM Network

Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) is a standard developed by the European

Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It was created to describe the protocols for

the second generation (2G) digital cellular networks used by mobile phones and is now the

default global standard for mobile communications. GSM compresses and digitizes the data

and sends it with other streams of data, each in its timeslot.

GSM is a circuit-exchanged framework that partitions each 200 kHz frequency channel

into eight 25 kHz schedule frequencies. The GSM devised a combination of TDMA/FDMA

as a method to divide the frequency band to all the users. The FDMA part divides the

frequency of a total of 25 MHz into 200 kHz frequencies. The TDMA then divides each 200

kHz frequency channel into eight 25 kHz time slots. Most of the GSM operators in India use

the 900 MHz band. One of the critical features in GSM is the SIM card. For the network to

know which user is connected to the system, the phone or in our case, the module uses a SIM

card. The SIM card contains the user's phone book and subscription information.

3.7. Bulk Messaging Service

A bulk messaging service is generally used as a service to send messages (SMS) in bulk to

large groups. An example is promotional messages which we receive on our phones. These

bulk messaging service groups interface with a service provider’s SMS gateway to ensure the

delivery of messages to the phones. An SMS gateway acts as a relay between the mobile

network operators and a wireless Application Service Provider (ASP). These SMS gateways

allow for SMS traffic to be distributed via a direct connection to the Short Message Service

Centre (SMSC) of the mobile network operator and then onto the recipient’s phone number.

3.8. SMSC

Short Message Service Centre is responsible for handling SMS operations of a wireless

network. When an SMS message is sent from a mobile phone, it will reach an SMS center

first and then the SMS centre forwards the SMS message to the destination.



3.9. SMS Gateway

Different companies develop different SMSCs with their protocols. Two SMSCs cannot be

connected if their protocol is not the same. Therefore, an SMS Gateway is placed between

them which acts as a relay. It translates one SMSC protocol into another.

3.10. Database in Raspberry Pi

RDBMS: Relational Database Management System is a DBMS that stores data that are

related to one another. Relational databases are based on the relational model, where every

row in the table is a collection of related values. Normalization is present in RDBMS which

reduces the data redundancy. It is the process of organising the data in the database. It breaks

larger tables into smaller ones and forms a relationship between them. Normalisation helps in

eliminating anomalies which tend to leave the database in an inconsistent state.

The RDBMS stores data in the form of tables. A table is a collection of related data entries,

and it contains rows (tuples) and columns (attributes) to store the data. Each table has Keys

that help to identify a row and establish relations between tables.

Primary Key: A primary key is an attribute that allows you to identify each row in a table

uniquely. It becomes the identifying key of the table. Primary keys should contain unique

values.

Foreign Key: A foreign is an attribute of one table which points to the foreign key of another

table. It establishes a relation between the two tables.

Candidate Key: A candidate key is an attribute or set of characteristics that uniquely identify

a row in a table. The Primary Key is selected from the Candidate Key.

Entity: An entity can be any class or object in a database. An entity is a table in a database.

An entity is represented as a rectangle.

Attribute: Attributes are the components or the characteristics of an entity. They are the

column of the table. An attribute is represented as an ellipse. The primary key is represented

as an ellipse, with its name, underlined.

Relation: A relation is used to describe the relationship between entities. It is represented as a

diamond. There are four main types of relations- One-to-One, One-to-Many, Many-to-One,

Many-to-Many.

In the database of our project, tables on the details of the doctors, the nurses, and the

patient’s along with the patient’s vitals is created. The vitals of the patient gets automatically

updated at regular intervals in the database. Any information can be retrieved from the

database using a simple SQL query.

The database is an essential backup component in the prototype where the data is saved.



4. PROCEDURE

Application of the Image Processing techniques on digital X-Ray images using

MATLAB: For our next application, we took a digital X-Ray image sample of a brain and

applied the concepts of image processing to segment the desired part of the x-ray image, i.e.,

the area of the discomfort faced by the patient for better diagnosis of the problem. The

segmented image is only highlighted while the surrounding areas are darkened.



ThingSpeak: ThingSpeak is an IoT analytics platform service that allows you to aggregate,

visualise and analyse live data streams in the cloud. Data can be sent to ThingSpeak from

your devices, create instant visualization of live data and send alerts.

5. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The pulse rate and body temperature are correctly detected using the pulse rate sensor and

temperature sensor respectively.



The final segmented image has been sent and received via mail.

When the vitals dropped down to critical condition, the vitals are sent directly to the doctor’s

and the nurse’s mobile phone in the form of an SMS message.

The data pertaining to the vitals is stored in the ThingSpeak cloud.



6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

6.1. Conclusion

A prototype is built, which is used to automatically detect important patient vitals such as

body temperature, pulse rate and ECG sensor and sent to the doctor’s and nurse’s mobile

phone using GSM network and Bulk messaging service via SMS text message. A database is

created to record and save the data of the details of the doctors’, nurses’ and the patient along

with the patient’s vitals for future reference and backup.

Image processing techniques like segmentation and thresholding are used on digital X-

Ray images to segment and threshold the images, which can help the doctor provide accurate

analysis and diagnosis of the problem. This has been done using MATLAB and the final

segmented and resized image is sent to the doctor’s email ID so that the doctor can view

anytime.

Finally, the data about the vitals is stored in the ThingSpeak cloud.

6.2. Future Scope

The project can be made purely based on GSM using the GSM module so that the transfer of

patient vitals data to the doctor’s mobile can be made independent of any WiFi and mobile

data.

A two-way correspondence can be established between the doctor’s phone and the

Raspberry Pi with the GSM module so that the doctor can keep communicating with the

hospital in case of an extreme emergency.

Email communication can be included as a means of back up of the vitals, which will also

enable the doctor to re-check the vitals whenever required.

The image processing techniques for the segmentation of the digital X-Ray images can be

made automatically to speed-up the process.

By increasing the budget of the project components, much more sophisticated project

components can be used to make the prototype more robust and refined. The project can be

enhanced.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms and techniques can be used to

automatically detect the fall in the vitals and send an SMS to the doctor’s phone and notify

the hospital.



REFERENCES

[1] Satwik, K., Ramesh, N., Reshma, SK., Estimation and Monitoring of Vital Signs in

HumanBody by using Smart Device. In: 2019, International Journal of Innovative Techno

2019, d Exploring Engineering (IJITEE).

[2] Townsend, B., Abawajy, J., and Kim, T. (2011). SMS-Based Medical Diagnostic

Telemetry Data Transmission Protocol for Medical Sensors. Sensors, [online] 11(4),

pp.4231-4243.

[3] Arora, J., Singh, A., Singh, N., Rawat, S., and Singh, G. (2014). Heartbeat Rate

Monitoring System by Pulse Technique Using HB Sensor. In: International Conference on

Information Communication and Embedded Systems (ICICES2014). IEEE.

[4] Khan, M., and Tripathi, A. (2018). Digital Patient Eye. 2018 3rd International Conference

On Internet of Things: Smart Innovation and Usages (IoT-SIU).

[5] Pal, S., Kumar, S., Rajeswari, R., and Swain, K. (2017). Remote health assistance and

automatic ambulance service. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart

Technologies and Management for Computing, Communication, Controls, Energy and

Materials (ICSTM).

[6] Suganthi, J., Umareddy, N., and Awasthi, N. (2012). Medical alert systems with

TeleHealth & telemedicine monitoring using GSM and GPS technology. In: 2012 Third

International Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies

(ICCCNT'12). IEEE

[7] Fanucci, L., Saponara, S., Bacchillone, T., Donati, M., Barba, P., Sanchez-Tato, I., and

Carmona, C. (2013). Sensing Devices and Sensor Signal Processing for Remote

Monitoring of Vital Signs in CHF Patients. IEEE.

[8] Al-Fuqaha, A., Guizani, M., Mohammadi, M., Aledhari, M., and Ayyash, M. (2015).

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and

Applications. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, [online] 17(4), pp.2347-2376.

[9] Surya Deekshith Gupta, M., Patchava, V. and Menezes, V. (2015). Healthcare based on

IoT using Raspberry Pi. In: 2015 International Conference on Green Computing and

Internet of Things (ICGCIoT).

[10] Ur Rahman, Zia. (2017). GSM Technology: Architecture, Security, and Future

Challenges. International Journal of Science Engineering and Advance Technology, 5. 70-

74.

[11] Maksimovic, Mirjana & Vujovic, Vladimir & Davidović, Nikola & Milosevic, Vladimir

& Perisic, Branko. (2014). Raspberry Pi as Internet of Things hardware: Performances and

Constraints.

[12] Gurusamy, Vairaprakash & Kannan, Subbu & G.Nalini, (2014). Review on image

segmentation techniques.

AUTOMATIC DATA TRANSFER USING SMS AND ITS …€¦ · The vitals which are sent via SMS and GSM network should be backed up for future references. For this purpose, a database to

Documents