Role of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

The PDA carried by the lady health worker acts as a base station for transmission of patient's data to the main server in the hospital. Its software part consists of a device driver for detecting and handling data gathering layer, and a local application interface which displays the gathered data for local monitoring and sends it to the main server for medical analysis. The feedback from server is displayed on the PDA. The PDA also provides an interface for entering patient's data manually or reading it automatically using the patient identification system. The PDA will also store automatically scheduled tasks for the lady health worker, making it easier for her to keep track of her duties. These tasks could be updated remotely by doctor from the hospital to give advice for a particular patient. Thus, the efficiency of lady health workers will be increased as their schedules will be automated and updated from a central office. An abstraction layer will be developed for handling the device setup and control of data gathering module. The abstraction layer on the PDA will hide the device setup of data gathering module and other hardware specifics from the application level. It will provide simple API calls which will make the job of application development easy.

Patient Identification System

As the purpose of this whole system is to automate the process of antenatal checkups and reduce the interventions of lady health workers to a minimum, the identification of patients shall also be automated. Identity cards using smart card technology shall be issued for each patient. These cards will contain the personal details, medical history record and unique identifier for each patient. The lady health worker shall swap the card through a card reader attached to the PDA and the patient's data will be automatically read and loaded in the application. This data will be sent along with the medical data obtained by the sensors.

Features of PDA

            The local application at PDA will focus on displaying the patient's information for local monitoring. As the system is to be used by not-so-well-educated lady health workers, the information will be displayed in a simplistic manner so as to minimize the level of training required to operate the application.

            The application will also provide a configuration panel to adjust settings for connection to remote server located at the hospital. The application will also provide necessary controls to adjust the parameters of certain sensors. This application will be based on the APIs already developed in the abstraction layer of the PDA's software.

            Along with the display of data, this application will also notify the user with the help of alarms in case any measurement goes out of its normal bounds. The application will notify the user if some sensor is not responding for some time.

             For transfer to remote server, this application will also provide some data compression techniques. This will help in reducing the payload of the information sent to the remote server. The communication with the remote server will be made secure by using state of the art cryptographic techniques.

             The local monitoring application will also provide the lady health worker with an editable field to enter the verbal input/complaints of patients and LHW's findings. These findings will be transmitted to the hospital server along-with the physiological data of the patient. It will be recorded in the database and displayed on the remote monitoring application when the doctor views that particular patient's data.

             The local monitoring application will also provide the facility to record the data offline and transmit it later. If GPRS is not available in a region, this file can be copied on a memory stick and uploaded to the server later from some other region or using a different medium e.g. internet on telephone. Moreover, the LHW will be able to retrieve these saved records later if needed.

Data Transmission