Power supply issues in e-health monitoring applications

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in the development of e-health systems for the continuous remote patient monitoring of physiological data such as temperature, heart rate (HR), Blood pressure (BP), oxygenation (SpO2), respiration and glucose levels. The roll-out of such schemes show promise in delivering improvements in patient care while at the same time reducing both the demand for resources and the financial burden on healthcare systems. These wearable monitoring systems are used to monitor, log and transmit patient data to a central health authority. Depending on the patient, it is often critical that the monitoring system reliability is high to deliver the appropriate patient care and ensure patient safety. However, since wearable systems are solely dependent on battery power, continuous monitoring will rapidly deplete the battery energy making the system prone to failure. In this paper, methods to reduce power consumption will be discussed using the example of prosthetic socket temperature monitoring data.