Portable embedded medical box implementation for health monitoring applications in avionic environments

In the work described in this article, several types of health monitoring sensor modules have been integrated in a compact portable enclosure - such as Electrocardiogram, pulse rate, blood pressure, oximetry, temperature. In addition, a control board was designed and implemented with the purpose of interfacing and processing the data arriving from the sensor modules, and their transfer to a standard RS232 interface. The board was designed for low power operation at the minimum output data rate. To this end, maximum measurement time and also low sampling rate regarding the continuous health monitoring measurements (ECG, Oximetry) were considered. A two layered (Master-Slave) microcontroller architecture was configured to process the sensor output frame and embed relevant information, such as seat number, in order to make storage and data retrieval possible over a large network. A graphic display was also integrated with the aim of projecting passenger health state and triggering alarms when necessary. The medical box is connected to a wireless optical data network inside the aircraft cabin providing maximum flexibility. Although the primary purpose of the system realized was the alerting of trained onboard staff about a broad spectrum of possible health failures, remote health monitoring at ground presents itself as a possibility under the network infrastructure already in place.