Design of wireless mobile monitoring of blood pressure for underserved in China by using short messaging service

High blood pressure (hypertension) is the leading chronic disease in China and has become the main factor for many high risk diseases such as diabetes, heart attack and cancer. At present, there are more than 100 million hypertension patients in China, but only 44% of them have been diagnosed. In some cities like Shanghai, hypertension is increasing at an annual rate of over 10%. For early diagnosis of hypertension and other chronic diseases, a system has been designed and presented in this paper. The proposed design consists of three main parts: a wrist Blood Pressure (BP) measurement unit, a server unit and a terminal unit. Blood Pressure is detected and the data acquired by sensors intelligently. The data is then transmitted to the remote server unit located at Community Healthcare Centers/Points (CHC/P) by using Short Messaging Service (SMS), and notification information is sent to the terminal unit to inform users if patientpsilas BP is abnormal.