Augmenting Cloud Connectivity with Opportunistic Networks for Rural Remote Patient Monitoring
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Current remote patient monitoring (RPM) systems are fully reliant on the Internet. However, complete reliance on Internet connectivity is impractical in low resource and remote environments where modern infrastructure is often lacking, power outages are frequent, and/or network connectivity is sparse (e.g. rural communities, mountainous regions of Appalachia, American Indian reservations, developing countries, and natural disaster situations). This paper proposes supplementing intermittent Internet with opportunistic communication to leverage the social behaviors of patients, caregivers, and society members to facilitate out-of-range monitoring of patients via Bluetooth 5 during intermittent network connectivity. The architecture is evaluated using U.S. Census Bureau, the National Cancer Institute's, and IPUMS ATUS sample data for Owingsville, KY, and is compared against a delay tolerant RPM case that is completely disconnected from the Internet. The findings show that with only 0.30 rural population participation, the architecture can deliver 0.94 of non-emergency medical information with at least half of the information having a latency of 5 hours. In addition, the paper provides insights on how supplemented networks can be used in real-world rural RPM (RRPM) systems for different domain applications.
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