An open NFC-based platform for vital signs monitoring

The vital signs monitoring is very useful to detect medical diseases. The paper presents an open, flexible, wireless and portable platform for monitoring vital signs in the healthcare scenarios, both indoor and outdoor. The platform has been designed in order to overcome the limitations of well-known technologies for mobile architectures, such as the battery lifetime and the lack of the open source codes. To reduce these issues the platform integrates the fast, easy-to-use, safe and low-power Near Field Communication protocol for data transmission in proximity, addressing the Internet of Things paradigm. The platform uses the Arduino NANO board and the related open source software libraries, so it could be possible to add new functionalities in a fast way. The first prototype of the platform has been customized for human body temperature measurement by using the digital TMP100 temperature sensor. However, a real “ecosystem” of portable devices could be prototyped with low-effort for the acquisition/transmission of other kind of clinical signs such as heart-rate, breath-rate, ECG.