Sunday, July 28, 2013

Medical Electronics For Chronic Illness

Chronic illness is defined as a person that has a disease more than three months such as cancer, arthritis,diabetes, HIV/AIDS, etc.  According to World Health Organization (WHO) the mortality rate in the world due to chronic illness was reported to be 60% of all death.  This rate was reported in 2005 this mean that the rate in year 2013 will be higher based of our pollution rate and all.  In US alone the 70% death rate is due chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancers, stroke, chronic respiratory disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, mental illness and kidney diseases.  90% of the seniors have at least one chronic disease. 

The mortality rates can be reduces tremendously if we could have early detection and response to be sent to
the respective health institutions.  With our modern technology this can be done easily especially using embedded technology coupled with communication technology (Bluetooth, GSM, etc.).  Different type of sensors can be attached to a person body and the sensors are constantly monitoring the person. All the sensors' reading are sent to a base station located at home via wireless such as Bluetooth, etc. The reading will be transmitted to a remote location (hospital, health institution, etc.) via GPRS network, internet, etc.  There are many ways to send the sensors' reading to a remote location.  One of the method is to transmit the data via GPRS network and for those location where wireless data network is unavailable, Power-Line-Carrier (PLC) can be used to transmit the data.  PLC considered a full proof method of transmitting the data to remote location as power grid is available even though at some remote area. With this method, the infrastructure costs is much more cost effective; as long as power grid is available the communication to remote location is possible.  One only need the PLC transceiver to do so.   Power-Line-Carrier is very interesting topic and there are many types of protocol for PLC.  Next, I will cover some of the PLC technologies.

No comments:

Post a Comment