Tele-Healthcare Monitoring System-Based for the Management of Diabetes Emergencie

Introduction: Diabetes mellitus is a global health burden whose prevalence is increasing worldwide. Remote patient monitoring, an automated process which involve transmission of data swiftly from the person with diabetes to the health care providers is often considered to be a technological solution to the challenges of health care delivery with potential of reducing both morbidity and mortality. While the use of telehealth in diabetes management is becoming more prominent, however its use in the management of diabetes emergencies is not very common. Objective: To evaluate telehealth intervention in the management of patient with diabetes in the emergency setting with resultant early diagnosis and management. Methods: This paper presents a design, implementation and evaluation of Tele-healthcare monitoring system with the aids of GPS, smartphone and cellular network infrastructure to monitor patients with diabetes especially during diabetic emergencies. This system depends on remote monitoring of patient when away from the place of domicile or their treating doctor or family members using patient’s data. Patient can also be linked to nearby hospitals using GPS and the attending doctors would have access to patient’s data. Alarm is also issued by the system to the next-of-kin/family members or care giver by sending emergency SMS including the location, time and patient’s clinical condition. The developed system consists of mobile application and web based application. The Mobile application was developed with JAVA programming language and SQLite database. Results: The result from the evaluation of the developed system shows effectiveness of 83.33% and mean users’ perception of 94%. Conclusion: This system is simple and cost-effective to be implemented and enables early intervention when the blood glucose is abnormally high or low in order to save life of the patient without delay.