Mobile Healthcare System for Monitoring and Diagnosis in Oman

The idea of providing medical information and health care services to a remote patient has made telemedicine emerge as a fast and rapidly expanding area of research. The adoption of wireless technology has made possible new applications in healthcare provision, such as remote routine check-ups, emergency and rescue situations, and sports science physiological measurements. The technology should allow medical services to be delivered to any location within the coverage of a cellular network. A patient from a rural area can be given a routine check via a cellular network without having to commute regularly to a hospital. Routine inspections and monitoring could be done while the patient is at home, travelling, at work or at leisure, thereby relieving resources for more demanding hospital cases. System of wearable and implantable medical devices emerged with wireless technology is called Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). In such WBAN system, biological signals are collected from patients and sent wirelessly to a base station where the data could be stored and analyzed. Thus, WBAN improves the performance of hospitals and health care centers by reducing the burden on hospital staff as well as decreasing the death rates in emergency or home monitoring cases. Furthermore, it also reduces the time consumed, overheads and job redundancy. WBAN -based healthcare monitoring is still in its infancy. The aim of this research project is to study, design and implement a telemedicine system for sleep disorders in Oman. Initially, a Center-to-Center (C2C) work model between Ibri health center and SQU hospital will be developed. Then, it will be extended in a later stage to cover a longer distance: between Salalah hospital and SQU hospital. A fully Body Area Sensor Network is required to perform a continuously healthcare monitoring. The biomedical signals, such as electrocardiogram (ECG), oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, and so on should be collected, in the health center, for patients who need healthcare monitoring. The more biomedical signals transmitted, the more detail on patient s conditions that will help the doctor at SQU hospital in his task to control and diagnose instantly. The challenge is how to achieve both, sensing and monitoring wirelessly. Different from