Rinku IoMT

Abstract

One of the recommendations from COVID-19’s specialists is to stay home and to contact the authorities, e.g. via SMS message if we show symptoms like cough, body pain, fever, and trouble breathing. This approach considers the patient’s report but lacks supporting physiological data. Medical personnel doesn’t have a mechanism to validate what the patient is referring from his/her house. This paper proposes a solution to this scenario, called Rinku system. Rinku integrates an electronic system (Clinical Kit) that includes devices that measure a person’s body temperature, pulse rate and oxygen saturation; and a digital platform that stores (in the cloud) and shows the information gathered by the sensors. The aim is to use the system to offer health professionals relevant information that can help them to validate COVID-19 symptoms remotely. Rinku can handle information from multiple patients at a time and provide valuable data related to the severity of the symptoms, helping medical staff to make decisions on which patients need to go to the hospital and when, optimizing sanitary resources. In this paper, Rinku’s Clinical Kit component was tested for the functionality of its enclosure, the IoT architecture to communicate effectively to the cloud, and the task of monitoring physiological parameters correctly. The results show that the enclosure design is convenient, the IoT architecture is functional and the tracking of temperature, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels from subjects is promising. Rinku and similar systems that allow precise physiological monitoring have the potential to provide an accurate forecast regarding the demand of ventilators and/or other sanitary resources related to this pandemic, and even the location of the patients.