Abstract

Wearable health devices allow acquisition of patients’ vital signs and health status monitoring outside conventional medical facilities for remote medical diagnosis and rapid medical attention during emergencies. While attempting to provide real-world online medical services, researchers have developed several Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) telemedicine systems such as the conventional smart wearable health devices for vital signs monitoring readily available from the market. However, optimal exploitation of critical vital signs data acquired from these traditional devices for online medical consultations in realtime has not received adequate attention. In this paper, an IoMT-based wearable Vital Signs Monitoring Network (VIMONET) that employs the widely accepted publish/subscribe lightweight Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) communication protocol was developed. The VIMONET comprises of a contactless medical data sensing unit, transmitting unit and an e-clinic platform for real-time medical consultations. The e-clinic platform offers online medical services by utilising vital signs data obtained from wearable hardware for professional consultations in real time. Performance analysis indicates that the wearable VIMONET offers stable high-speed data transfer at an average of 337.9ms, about 12.63% slightly above the benchmark for industrial IoT applications. An average throughput of 1122.58Bps which signifies the data transmitted, read, stored and available for request on the e-clinic server was also achieved.

Keywords: E-clinic platform; Communication protocol; Telemedicine; Vital signs; Wearable device