IoMT: Rinku's Clinical Kit Applied to Collect Information Related to COVID-19 Through Medical Sensors

Abstract

COVID-19 healthcare professionals recommend the general population staying at home and remote contacting the authorities, e.g. via SMS messages, if they show symptoms like cough, body pain, fever, and breathing difficulties. Although this approach considers the patient self-report, it is not supported by physiological data, i.e. medical personnel does not have a remote mechanism to validate such symptoms. This paper proposes a system, called Rinku, to address the abovementioned scenario. Rinku integrates an electronic system (ClinicalKit) comprising biomedical sensors for body temperature, pulse rate, and oxygen saturation, as well as a digital platform for storing and displaying the collected data. Rinku system aims to provide health professionals with relevant information to remotely validate COVID-19 symptoms. Rinku can handle simultaneous information from multiple patients and provide valuable data related to the severity of the reported symptoms, which in turn could help healthcare professionals to make management decisions to optimize their clinical resources. In this paper, the functionality of the ClinicalKit, communication between the IoT architecture and the cloud, and the monitoring of physiological parameters were tested. The results showed that the enclosure design is convenient, IoT architecture is functional and the tracking of temperature, heart rate, and blood oxygen levels from subjects is promising. We consider that the Rinku system has the potential to provide an accurate forecast regarding the demand for clinical resources and take prompt actions related to this pandemic.