Automated NFC enabled rural healthcare for reliable patient record maintainance

Body sensor networks can be used for health monitoring of patients by expert medical doctors, in remote locations like rural areas in developing countries, and can also be used to provide medical aid to areas affected by natural disasters in any part of the world. An important issue to be addressed, when the number of patients is large, is to reliably maintain the patient records and have simple automated mobile applications for healthcare helpers to use. We propose an automated healthcare architecture using NFC-enabled mobile phones and patients having their patient ID on RFID tags. It utilizes NFC-enabled mobile phones to read the patient ID, followed by automated gathering of healthcare vital parameters from body sensors using Bluetooth, analyses the information and transmits it to a medical server for expert feedback. With limited hospital resources and less training requirement for healthcare helpers through simpler applications, this automation of healthcare processing can provide time effective and reliable mass health consultation from medical experts in remote locations.