Introduction

Hello and Welcome to the Introductory blog of Patient Monitoring System using 96Boards. In this blog I am going to introduce the new blog series focussed on monitoring the patients in hospital using BLE Mesh functionality provided by 96Boards.

BLE Mesh

According to Wikipedia, “Bluetooth ® wireless technology mesh networking, conceived in 2015, adopted on July 13, 2017 is a protocol based upon Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that allows for many-to-many communication over Bluetooth radio. It has been defined in Mesh Profile Specification and Mesh Model Specification.”

As stated in Wikipedia, BLE mesh functionality is provided to create an end to end automation using BLE compatible device. You can create multiple hops and cover the range in Kms without the need of any expensive hardware. The requirement for this BLE mesh functionality is the BLE compatible hardware i.e., Bluetooth 4.0 and above-supported devices.

Recently, this BLE mesh support has been added to zephyr RTOS by Johan Hedberg of Intel. So, now we can make use of both zephyr and BLE mesh in our product in order to create an IoT solution. The implementation of mesh functionality in zephyr can be found here.

This blog is not intended to provide a detailed info on BLE mesh, for knowing all the internals please see the Specification.

Patient Monitoring System

With the help of the duo combination of zephyr and BLE Mesh, I am going to show how to build a Patient Monitoring System using 96Boards. The core idea here is to monitor the patients in a ward remotely and trigger notification to doctor when the condition goes abnormal. Also, if any patient is in need of help he can press an emergency button to alert the doctors.

Project Roadmap

As like the previous projects, I have partitioned this project into a series of parts:

Part 1: Demonstrate BLE mesh using 96Boards IE
Part 2: Demonstrate data exchange between BLE nodes and Gateway
Part 3: Setup Cloud and Demonstrate data streaming
Part 4: Final implementation of Patient Monitoring System using 96Boards

BoM

Below is the Bill of Materials (BoM) needed for project recreation.

Note: The above mentioned BoM is applicable for a single node of BLE mesh except the Gateway.

Conclusion

So, that’s it for the introductory blog. I hope this blog triggerd much anticipation about the project among the community as like with me ;-)

Please stay tuned for the Part 1 of this project.

Meantime, if you have any ideas of making this project more attractive and useful please share it in comments. We would like to hear from the community!