Changing communications within hospital and home health care

Over the last decade, new hospitals are integrating Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in their facilities. Although e-health is a relatively recent term for healthcare practice supported by electronic processes, ubiquitous healthcare monitoring, also known as m-health, is already an emerging research area. Patient monitoring in diverse environments, such as nursing homes or assisted living, are gaining importance. Traditional methods present some problems, as they don´t allow enough patient mobility. In this situation, real time transmission of multiple medical data, wearable computing, wireless access in ubiquitous systems and wearable devices for pervasive healthcare can meet the needs of these environments. However, the software and infrastructure deployed in hospitals is not easy to migrate to wireless systems. In some cases, the migration to new technologies can be costly. This paper focuses on the design of a modular, scalable and economical framework to improve the monitoring and checking of patients in different contexts. The challenge is to produce a system to transmit the patient´s biomedical data directly to a hospital for monitoring or diagnosis using new communication modules. The modular designed adopted is intended to provide a future-proofed system, whose functionality may be upgraded by modifying the hardware or software. The modules have been validated in different contexts to prove their versatility.