Inspired to help his grandmother receive medical treatment at home rather than in the hospital, Mikolaj (Nick) Mroszczak, a mechanical engineering student at Cardiff University, developed a web-connected medical monitor using Vernier sensors during his internship at National Instruments. (While Vernier sensors are not intended for medical applications, they can easily connect to a variety of software platforms like NI LabVIEW, making them perfect for prototyping).

The goal of his student engineering project was to develop a proof-of-concept model for a low-cost medical monitor that would be able to publish data to the cloud. Nick envisioned that his device might allow medical professionals to remotely monitor health data for any potential emergencies, while patients remain in the comfort of their home.

In just one week, Nick connected a Vernier EKG Sensor and Spirometer to his NI myRIO embedded controller and wrote a LabVIEW program to acquire, analyze, display, and log sensor data to the cloud. The data could now be monitored from a browser on a tablet, smart phone, or home computer.

In addition to supporting patients like his grandmother, Nick imagines other uses where cloud-published biomedical data would be helpful. Consider the benefits of providing medical advice to remote locations during natural disasters or times of war.

Nick’s project outline can be found here.

As noted in Nick’s project, he used an application called Data Dashboard to remotely monitor sensor data. This application allows you to create custom dashboards for iPad, Android, and Windows devices that can monitor and control LabVIEW Applications using shared variables.