People with special medical monitoring needs can, these days, be sent home and remotely monitored through the use of data logging medical sensors and a transmission base-station. While this can improve quality of life by allowing the patient to spend most of their time at home, most current technologies rely on hardwired landline technology or expensive mobile data transmissions to transmit data to a medical facility. The aim of this paper is to investigate and develop an approach to increase the freedom of a monitored patient and decrease costs by utilising mobile technologies and SMS messaging to transmit data from patient to medico. To this end, we evaluated the capabilities of SMS and propose a generic communications protocol which can work within the constraints of the SMS format, but provide the necessary redundancy and robustness to be used for the transmission of non-critical medical telemetry from data logging medical sensors.
Keywords: GSM; SMS; data communications; data transmission; information privacy; information security; medical telemetry; mobile communications; short message service; telemetry.