Long term health monitoring using mHealth platform

mHealth is a growing concept across the globe. This is due to mobile access becoming more ubiquitous than the healthcare access in urban as well as rural areas. mHealth makes use of mobile communication technology for broad range of healthcare applications. It includes health information delivery, remote health monitoring of the patient, remote diagnosis and even remote treatment of the patients. There is a huge scope for using mobile communication technology for the development and deployment of innovative healthcare products and services. This paper presents introduction to mHealth concept. It further highlights various considerations for long term health monitoring as one of the major application area of mHealth. To demonstrate the concept, a prototype system for long term ECG monitoring is proposed. The system comprises of a 3 lead ECG device with microcontroller and Bluetooth connectivity. An Android based mobile application has been used to display wirelessly received ECG data in the form of ECG Wave.