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A New IoT Patient Monitoring System for

Hemodialysis Treatment

Muhammad Faisal Zainol, Rohani S Mohamed Farook Rosilah Hassan

Faculty of Engineering Technology, Faculty of Engineering Technology, Centre for Cyber Security
Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Faculty of Information Science & Tech.
Perlis, MALAYSIA. Perlis, MALAYSIA. Universiti Kembagsaan Malayasia,
faisalzainol96@gmail.com rohani@unimap.edu.my 43600, UKM, Bangi,Selangor,
MALAYSIA.
Aznor Hanah Abdul Halim rosilah@ukm.edu.my
Faculty of Engineering Technology, Mohamad Rizal Abdul Rejab
Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Faculty of Engineering Technology, Zulkifli Husin
Perlis, MALAYSIA. Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP), Faculty of Engineering Technology,
aznor@unimap.edu.my Perlis, MALAYSIA. Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP),
m.rizal@unimap.edu.my Perlis, MALAYSIA.
zulhusin@unimap.edu.my

Abstract— Ominously, end stage renal disease (ESRD)

became a more frequent disease. Dialysis process acts as kidney
and perform the diffusion proses to remove the accumulated
metabolic waste products and ultrafiltration process that remove
the excess fluids from the body. The dialysis process is
unfortunately the life-prolonging treatment for this illness to
enable the patient lives their normal life. However, it is quite a
difficult and tiring process for patients when it comes to maintain
their health to be optimal condition in between the dialysis
scheduled days. The kidney works 24 hours performing diffusion
and ultrafiltration process throughout a day to keep our body
clean and stabile. The dialysis is a pre scheduled process that
patient enrol for normally 4 hours every alternate days. The
frequency could increase if there is a need or emergency condition.
The patient if does not control their water intake could lead to
water retention where their heart need to work hard and cause
the patient to feel fatigue, difficulty to sleep and induce cough.
Since the ESRD patient will less urinate, the water drank will stay
on the blood and cause bloated feeling and lead to heart pulse rate
and blood pressure increase. Monitoring the physiological
parameters for ESRD facing a huge lack, if not a total absence.
Systems that able to monitor the well-being of patients and
informing the precautions and the solutions to be adapted. This
project consists of designing a circuit and integration of pulse and
infrared temperature sensors using MCU Arduino and Raspberry
Pi for data storage and management, allowing the patients to
record those parameters by themselves. This study suggests a new
system as a solution for the monitoring and control of the users
regarding their health major information and simultaneously
send it to their doctors. The recorded information will be stored
in a unique database enabling the admin and the patients to
monitor and consult their own health parameters in a webpage.
The purpose of this study is to develop a new system to control
and ease the dialysis mechanism and ensure the patient well-
being.
Keywords- Dialysis, MCU Arduino, Raspberry Pi, patient well-
being, monitoring system.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) represents the smart
Internet concept which consists of connecting everything
surrounding us to Internet and making it responsible of
arranging and exchanging. Numerous studies have been
conducted concerning IoT technologies and all showed that
there is significant and urgent need for platforms development
[1][2]. IoT significantly spread in healthcare through the
development of new platforms giving birth to Internet of
Medical Things (IoMT) [3]. It is todays at the highest peak as
it has essential potentialities among all other types of IoT
applications [4]. In healthcare, IoT represents a developed
technology integrating all the smart resources, systems, and
devices ease diagnosis of diseases, to find out cures, drugs and
ensure a successful follow up in one unique system [5].
Recording information became fundamental since it constitute
a successful health providing a complete report about a detailed
daily status of patients can be provided [6]. Modern
Technology is necessary for any type of data recording to ease
and quicker this process through a local network where
mechanisms connect with each other to share and communicate
information [7].
The main objective of IoT-based monitoring and
controlling systems is to ensure a continuous control of all the
crucial patient parameters such as the body temperature, the
blood pressure, the glycemic index, or even the
electrocardiography and SpO2 [8]. Such systems can be
crucial and very useful for all health mechanisms and
treatments especially dialysis patients who require a more
tiring and detailed process for data gathering, and who do not
always have the strength to reach hemodialysis facilities.
Some patients may be living in rural communities or in harsh
living conditions and cannot easily access to dialysis
institutions as they are very limited. A previous study
conducted by Kang et al. showed a very high demand for

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adoption of IoT- based services in hospitals with 13% for
kidney dialysis rooms. In fact, for a dialysis monitoring
system, there is a huge lack of monitoring systems controlling
the well- being of the patient dialysis [9].
The purpose of this research is to develop a new monitoring
system for kidney dialysis patients using MCU Arduino and
Raspberry Pi. In fact, to ensure a well and useful functioning
of this system, the system be accessible by the nephrologist
doctor in charge, the dialysis nurse from hospital whereas the
the patient himself could utilize the kit from home in daily
scheduled durations. So that the system could notify the
doctors and nurses once the health conditions seems
deteriorating in case of any critical situation.
The structure of this paper consists of a section II explaining
the design procedure and providing the details about the
selected components. Section III presenting the results of the
designed circuit, and section IV justify a conclusion along
with the contribution of this work and the future possible
work.
II. METHODOLOGY
This study mainly focuses on hemodialysis patients that are
required to be monitored their heart rate. The heart rate could
be the identifier of the requirement for the dialysis. Water
retention in dialysis patient could increase the heart rate that
indicates the urgent treatment. The prototype enable the
doctors to monitor the heart rate recorded through the sensor
and alert the doctors and patients if action needed .
A. Hardware of the system
The main component of this circuit is an SBC as for a
single board computer called Raspberry Pi 3 as shown in Fig.
1. This type of boards is characterized with a basic
microcontroller similar to other existent ones such as the
MCU Arduino. The advantage of its use is that it enables the
code to be uploaded easily and directly from the smartphone
to the Raspberry Pi itself. It contains output pins necessary
for the project running. It also contributes in booting Wi-Fi,
USB, and Bluetooth.
Fig. 1. Raspberry Pi 3
Raspberry Pi 3 has been selected for this for its variety of
functions that can be crucial such as the wireless
communication, the basic microcontroller operation, and the
Bluetooth module. It consists of 27 GPIO I/O pin which are
necessary for the sensors, the jumper and other constituents.
Raspberry Pi 3 was used in this project as a web server to
store the information in the database. It also contains two 5V
DC pin two 3.3V DC power pins. The user can decide about
the sensor to be connected with each pin. It also has eight
ground pins which are connected to the circuit as decided by
the user. From GPIO0 to GPIO26 may be used for the input
and the output of the components used. It is also easily
powered by only using an external power supply through a
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USB. It can also transfer the coding to the circuit by wireless
means.
The second microcontroller used for this circuit is the MCU
Arduino. It can read the equivalent input including the body
temperature and heart rate. It is a wired device which requires
a USB connection to the computer to ensure the system run.
It is composed of 14 digital input/output pins and is necessary
since it reads the equivalent data received from the sensor
connected to it. All GPIO pins of the MCU Arduino can be
used as interrupts for functions, mainly HIGH, LOW,
RISING and FALLING, and can also play the role of a digital
converter. The core sensor used in this circuit is the
MLX90164 temperature sensor. It acts as an ultraviolet
thermometer for distant temperature measurement. It exists
two different methods of interfacing this sensor, which are
PWM and SMBus communication. This sensor is divided into
two main parts including the infrared thermophile detector
and the signal application conditioning processor. In fact, it
detects the radiation from the object requiring measurements.
Besides the power and the ground, it contains two major pins,
SDA and SCL.
TABLE I. CONNECTION BETWEEN THE BODY TEMPERATURE SENSOR AND
MLX90614 Pins MCU Arduino Pins
VDD 3.3V
VCC GND
SDA/PWM SDA(A4)
SCL SCL(A5)
THE MCU ARDUINO
The VCC pin of the sensor is connected to the 5V pin
whereas the GND pin is connected to the MCU Arduino GND
pin. Table I explains the connections between the temperature
sensor and the MCU Arduino pins. The sensor located at the
prototype box side to make the temperature reading easier for
the patient. It is detected by the infrared thermophile; thus, it
is not necessary to press the sensor.
The third major constituent is the heart rate sensor. It
consists of a simple optical heart rate sensor characterized
with an amplification and noise cancellation circuitry. It can
be placed either on the fingertip or the earlobe. Table II
summarizes the connections between the sensor and the MCU
Arduino. In fact, the pin+ is connected at 5V pin, pin- is at the
GND pin on MCU Arduino, and pin S is connected to A0.
TABLE II. CONNECTION BETWEEN THE PULSE RATE
SENSOR AND THE MCU ARDUINO
KY-039 MCU Arduino
S A0
Pin + 5V
Pin - GND
Minor components are included to the circuit such as the
buzzer to warn if the temperature is surpassed and the LED to
display the recorded information including the temperature
and the heartbeat as shown in Fig. 2. The switch is used to
start the MCU Arduino code programming and is placed on
top of the prototype.
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D. System User Interface

Fig. 2. Connection Circuit between the sensor and the MCU Arduino
B. Master and Slave
The master/slave refers to a communication model in which
one device or a process controls other slave devices. The
master is charged of giving the instructions and can also
receive them from the slaves. In this system, the master is
represented by the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B V1.2 and the
MCU Arduino represents the slave. The two components are
connected through a Serial Communication by a USB cable.
The coding for circuit board of the sensors is written and
executed within the MCU Arduino and the input data is
directed through the Raspberry Pi for the in-web server
recording. On the Raspberry Pi, MCU Arduino IDE is opened
through a VNC Viewer to directly obtain the reading process.
The setup for the master/slave for this circuit is shown in Fig.
3.
The system user interface of this system will be represented
by a webpage. It consists mainly on a PHP and an HTML
language. Both are necessary for the webpage creation. It has
been designed for web the development and has been used as
a general- purpose programming language. Regarding the
PHP, the coding is placed in www and contain an HTML file.
To access the system, users must create an account with a
username, an email and a password. PHP, HTML and CSS
codes are essential for the webpage creation, to store it in the
database and to transfer the data from database to webpage.
CSS is requested to add several styles to the webpage. The
patient and the admin may login at the same webpage.
The patient webpage will only display the health parameter
table, and the admin is charged of adding, editing and
deleting the information. Besides, the administrator can
monitor the data condition of the patient.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Prototype setup
As shown in Fig. 4, this system contains a pulse sensor, a
MLX90614 infrared body temperature sensor, and an LCD to
display the obtained information. The switch is needed to start
the program and the LED is added to light up whenever there
is a pulse flow. The reading will appear once the switch is
pressed. It will only receive the reading once the number of
the loop in the MCU Arduino code is set.

Fig. 3. Master/Slave Setup

C. VNC (Virtual Network Computing)

The Virtual Network Computing is a technique helping Fig. 4. Front view of the sensors set up
two operating systems to perform simultaneously. It works
like an isolated workstation and software. It mainly shares in
file, data or input. This technology enables the individuals to The top view of the system is represented in Fig. 5. It consist
access their desktops regardless their position. VNC operates of a breadboard used for the sensors, resistors, capacitor, and
in a client/server model and uses a particular network protocol other components connection. The MCU Arduino is linked to
named Remote Frame Buffer (RFB). VNC servers catches the Raspberry Pi 3 through a serial communication. The buzzer
local display framebuffer contents and shares them with the helps alarming the individual if the sensor’s temperature
client. exceeds 37°C.
To install VNC on a Raspberry PI, it is necessary to dispose
of a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and Ethernet cable. To
install the NOOB operating system in the memory card it is
recommended to attach it to the board. The first step consists
of unzipping the folder and copy it in the memory card to be
inserted inside the board. For the first time use, it is crucial to
run the setup on with the monitor. The Raspberry PI should
be setup with specific IP address to have its unique identity.
Raspberry PI is arranged with a password to avoid the
changes settings. It will also prompt the user to change
password for a higher security. To determine what IP address Fig. 5. Top view of the sensors set up
corresponds to this circuit’s Raspberry Pi, an advance IP
scanner is used. The board is already set with precise IP B. Sensors reading
address, it saved and can be run in anytime.
The data obtained from this system displayed in form of
tables and graphs. Three tables illustrated for each

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temperature, pulse and the list of users. All the data are
obtained in the webpage. The advantage of this system is that
all the data reading can be monitored by both the admin and
the patient. Fig. 6 shows the body temperature reading table,
taken directly from the database. Each data is unique for its
record time and date. Fig.7 shows the trend of the body
temperature flow monitoring data at a certain time. If the
temperature is between 35-37℃, the person in good
condition, and if it is exceeding 37℃, the individual has
fever.
Fig. 6. Body temperature reading
Fig. 7. Graph body temperature in respect with time
C. Web server
The web server displays the real-time update of each
sensor’s reading. It contains two table for each sensor in one
single database. Several readings are uploaded to the web
server as a form of tables. The data is stored until the reset is
performed. The two tables are placed in a single database
because to enable the connection with each other as shown is
Fig. 8.
Fig. 8. Data users stored in the server
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IV. CONCLUSION
This system has been successful and played an important
role in controlling and assisting the dialysis pre-process and
ensure the patient well-being. Several additions and
improvements in this circuit are planned, in the study process
for the obtention of a complete and operational dialysis
monitoring system. An Android application is in the
elaboration process, and it was recommended to develop a
short message service along with an email alert the patient
and the admin and ensure a perfect follow up, as well as the
development of a global positioning system to determine the
exact location of the patient if case of any unexpected event.
Thus, this study is emerging for a new system in the IoMT,
which highly contributes to the well-being of health services.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We would like to acknowledge through this paper the
Network and Communication Technology Research Group
for providing us with the necessary support and assistance,
FTK, UniMAP (R&D Grant), FTSM, and UKM (Grant DIP-
2018-040) for guaranteeing all the facilities necessary for
this study.
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