Smart wearable system for safety-related medical IoT application: case of epileptic patient working in industrial environment

Medical/Industrial IoT is being implemented currently in several domains due to the autonomy it offers to patients, as well as the productivity efficiency that it could enhance. Additionally, the ease of monitoring of the patient, and of action taking in case of sudden medical problems has highlighted the use of such system. The IoT application presented in this paper will target epileptic patients working in an industrial environment. A smart wearable jacket will capture continuously the vital signs of the patient. In case of problem detection, some control signals will be sent to nearby machines to disable them and to alert the medical entities in the working environment. As industrial environments are often safety-critical, the proposed approach is based on basic safety and reliability concepts, which will be enhanced in future works. For this aim, a set of various sensors is used in this work. Although none of the sensors are redundant, all of them give complementary data about the patient health and will insert diversity to the system. A further safety issue consists on using a safety-related processor architecture for processing the sensor data and providing safe outputs.