Bee: The Ultimate Medical Solution

Why build a healthcare solution?

Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, the importance of healthcare was already well-noted. Now, it is mainstream. We can all see the dangerous and life-threatening work that healthcare workers and front-line workers do. In a hospital with so many patients who need attention, 5 minutes can be the difference between life and death. The nurse has to go to each patient's room and must do simple measurements that a computer could do, when she could be saving time by helping patients.

This is the idea that inspired me. I wanted to help. That is why I put my tinkering knowledge to test and challenged myself to think of a medical design that could help hospitals save time by automating the measurement of things like EMG, Heart rate etc. My medical design will save the time in minutes and save lives in the thousands.

Ideology

My idea was to create separate, no-wires needed, Internet of Thing devices or "bees", hence the name of my design. The "bees" would be connected to a "hive", in this case the AWS cloud, where the health data would be saved and could be accessed by any healthcare official.

As mentioned in the above section, this would save time for the nurse and healthcare workers so they can channel their attention to helping and taking care of more patients.

During my journey had ups and downs, somethings worked and other didn't. In this post, I will take you through my journey of creating Bee.

First Steps

I first set my design on paper. My idea was that it would have a Microchip AVR-IoT WA or an Arduino MKR WiFi 1010. Connected to that would be either a Bio-metric MikroElektronika click or a Seeed Grove Bio-medical sensor. I would connect the chosen board and sensor to the Amazon Web Services cloud through MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), where it would be pushed to an S3 bucket (cloud storage).

Now that we have seen my design, let us see the real-world implementation.

Challenge

My plan was to use the Microchip AVR-IoT WA with the MikroElektronika HeartRate 8 click. I bought the boards ( a costly total of about $130), and my head exploded when I couldn't figure out how to use the MPLAB X IDE because of the absence of proper documentation focused for people who were starting to use their products. (I have been a C/C++/Arduino coder for 3 years).

I tried for ~1.5 months, but to no avail. The solution was nowhere to be found!

Solution

I rolled up my sleeves, chugged down a glass of water, and got to thinking, why not use the Arduino MKR WiFi 1010! I was familiar with Arduino and liked their good documentation and open-source content. I had my plan and acted on it.

I used the Arduino MKR WiFi 1010, Arduino MKR Connector Carrier, and some Seeed Grove Bio-medical sensors.

Sadly, the holiday season came around and I only got the heart rate sensor, MKR WiFi 1010, and the shield. The Seeed Studio factory shutdown due to COVID-19 and I wasn't able to get the rest of my hardware.

If my product had come into creation it would have had 3 "bees". Here I show the MKR WiFi 1010 connected to the HeartRate sensor. This part would have been one of the three "bees".

Conclusion

Even after all of the setbacks, I am happy to know that I will have a design that is ready to be deployed and help hospitals holistically.

I am thinking of adding a bar-code scanner to the design so each patient can have their own unique ID, speed up the process further as measurements are taken from different patients, and data is saved on the cloud.