Operating system performance measurements for Remote Patient Monitoring applications

The Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is becoming vital part of healthcare improving quality of care. The RPM system uses variety of sensors and wireless technologies to monitor multiple biological and environmental signals simultaneously providing status and trend data for the patient. The RPM system can also provide alarms/alerts for the patient or the caregiver in real-time so that the patient gets assistance in timely manner when an acute event occurs. The RPM system must detect such events in real-time to generate alarms/alerts. Use of mobile devices like smartphones and/or tablets for RPM enables patient mobility and provides real-time monitoring capability. The mobile device Operating System (OS) used for real-time RPM needs to meet the hard real-time requirements for alerts/alarms generation. The General Purpose OS (GPOS) uses fair scheduling algorithm for multitasking while Real Time OS (RTOS) uses preemptive scheduling. This paper evaluates the real-time performance of GPOS and a RTOS (QNX) under variety of load condition for RPM application. The results of the measurements indicate that the mobile device OS used for RPM must provide a prioritizing mechanism to satisfy the hard real-time requirements when the mobile device is multitasking and/or overloaded.