WAP in physiological monitoring

Many parties have already practiced telemedicine using cellular phones and the Internet. A current trend in telecommunication is the convergence of wireless communication and computer network technologies. Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) device is an example. Since WAP will also be a standard feature in future mobile communication devices, it is worthwhile to investigate in its use in telemedicine. Implementation and experiences with some of the WAP-based physiological monitoring applications developed in our laboratory are presented. The applications were written in Wireless Markup Language (WML), WML Script, and Perl. A MySQL relational database system was set up to store blood pressure and heart rate readings, patient records, clinic and hospital information, doctors' appointments with patients, and ECG data. A wireless ECG subsystem was built for recording indoor ambulatory ECG and for storing ECG data into the database. For testing, a WAP 1.1 compliant phone was used at GSM 1800MHz by CSD to connect to the WAP site through a WAP gateway, which was provided by a mobile phone service provider in Hong Kong. Data were successfully retrieved from the database and displayed on the phone. The system shows how WAP can be useful in remote patient monitoring and patient data retrieval.