Design Tracking System for At-home Medical Equipment during Natural Disasters

Abstract

Electricity-operated durable medical equipment (DME), such as ventilators, dialysis machines, and patient monitoring devices, are life-supporting machines used extensivelyby patients at home. While convenient and economical, at-home use of DME is susceptible to power outages, especially the ones caused by natural disasters that often occur in large area and for a long duration. This system consists of two parts: a hospital-based receiving device, called the Base Station node, and multiple transmitting devices, called User Nodes, each connected to the DME at patients’ homes. The Base Station and User Nodes is each built with a Arduino microcontroller, a GPS receiver module, and an Xbee® radio implementing the Zigbee® protocol. The Base Station device is programmed to receive and convey the information transmitted from the User Nodes to a nearby hospital’s patient monitoring computer.