Low-cost remote patient monitoring system based on reduced platform computer technology

Telemedicine is a well-accepted method providing healthcare benefits to people over long distances. However, in normal telemedicine practices, dedicated complex hardware and network backbones for data collection and communication make the system unintelligible to the common man. Centralization of telemedicine units also makes it accessible only to the immediate surrounding community. In an attempt to address these issues, a study aimed at developing a low-cost remote patient monitoring (RPM) system based on reduced platform computer technology has been carried out. The main focus of the work was to develop a real-time, universal serial bus plug-in module for a portable RPM system, specifically the XO Laptop. In addition, this system is also intended to serve as an educational tool especially for the One Laptop per Child target community. This article discusses data collection, preprocessing, and constraints such as network bandwidth and power availability prior to data transmission over a user datagram protocol (UDP)-based network.