You can monitor various health parameters with your Raspberry Pi or RBPi. All you need to do is to use the e-Health Sensor Platform by plugging it atop your RBPi. This arrangement is especially helpful in performing biometric and medical applications where nine different body parameters are to be sensed: oxygen in blood or SPO2, pulse, body temperature, airflow or breathing, electrocardiogram or ECG, galvanic skin response or GSR or Sweating, blood pressure or sphygmomanometer and patient position or accelerometer.
All this information is available in real time, and can be used to monitor the state of health of a patient. The sensitive data can be stored for subsequent analysis for medical diagnosis. Depending on the application, the biometric data gathered can be sent wirelessly over any of the six different connectivity options available: ZigBee, 802.15.4, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi.
For real time image diagnosis, you can attach a camera and send photos and videos of the patient to the medical diagnosis center. For permanent storage, the data can be sent to the Cloud. Visualization in real time is possible by transmitting the data over to a Smartphone or a laptop directly. There are plenty of applications for the iPhone and Android Smartphones that will allow the patient’s information to be seen.
This opens up a new era of open source medical products. The RBPi provides the new e-Health applications and products a quick proof of concept with the necessary tools. However, one of the key points in such applications is privacy and several security levels are provided with the platform.
The communication link layers use WPA2 for Wi-Fi and AES 128 for ZigBee and 802.14.5. The application layer uses a secure protocol (HTTPS) to ensure a point-to-point secure tunnel between the web server and each sensor node. Banks use this type of communication security protocols for their transactions.
The e-Health Sensor Platform is available from Cooking Hacks. Cooking Hacks, the open hardware division of Libelium, have designed it. The platform helps artists, developers and researchers to measure different biometric sensor data for their experimentation, tests or fun purposes. Compared with the expensive and proprietary medical market solutions, Cooking Hacks provides a comparatively cheap and open alternative.
Cooking Hacks also provides an RBPi to Arduino shields connection bridge, which includes the possibility of connecting the analog and digital sensors to both the boards. This allows harnessing the power and capabilities of the RBPi with the pinot of the Arduino. Further, they also have the arduPi library that allows the use of RBPi with the same code that is used for the Arduino. The arduPi library allows wireless modules, sensors, shields and electronic module or actuator to be interchangeably used for both RBPi and the Arduino.
Note: The e-Health Sensor Platform does not yet have a medical certification. Therefore, it must not be used to monitor patients who are critical and who need to be monitored by medical methods that are more accurate or those whose conditions need monitoring for ulterior professional diagnosis.
