A team of University of Houston researchers is designing an in-home health-monitoring system that will notify caregivers, via smartphones or PDAs, if their patients need attention.

"Our system will allow for such things as vital sign monitoring and location tracking using low-cost technologies and offering fast response times for caregivers," said Driss Benhaddou, an assistant professor of engineering technology at UH's College of Technology.

Four years ago, Benhaddou and his team began work on a wireless health-monitoring system in conjunction with the Abramson Center for the Future of Health, a joint partnership between UH's College of Technology and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, which emphasizes personalized medicine and medical device development.

"Our original thought was that sensor networks can be applied to any type of removed healthcare using off-the-shelf technology, which makes it cheaper, because you don't need to reinvent the wheel," Benhaddou said. "The technology uses processor boards found in a variety of electronics, which cost about $70 each. You could wire a whole home for about $1,000."

A patient whose movement is being monitored, perhaps because of Alzheimer's or dementia, will wear a sensor the size of a quarter on a belt or piece of clothing. A person whose vital signs, such as temperature, heartbeat or oxygen level, are being monitored will wear the sensor on his or her skin.

"The house would have a handful of sensors in various rooms, depending upon the square footage. Those sensors would communicate with the sensor on the person and with a hub, which would be connected to the Internet and communicate with a caregiver's smartphone or PDA," Benhaddou said.

He said installation of the system must be simple so that caregivers can do it on their own.

"Components can be added or removed without the intricate knowledge of the system, because it uses plug-and-play technology," assistant professor Deniz Gurkan said. "It is similar to plugging in a mouse to a computer using a USB port. You don't need to be a computer techie to be able to use it."

Benhaddou said monitoring vital signs with this kind of system in a hospital setting would take some of the burden off physicians and nurses.

"After surgery, for instance, you need to do a lot of monitoring. While you'll always need a nurse, such a system would improve the quality of the data that you're taking. It would track patients every single minute," he said.

Other applications of the wireless system, Benhaddou said, could reduce existing monitoring costs at assisted living centers, keep an eye on potentially sleep-deprived truck drivers and assess astronaut performance during NASA space missions.