Cloud-Connected Smart Health Kiosk for Rural Diagnostic Services

Access to quality healthcare in developing nations often remains challenging due to several factors including geographical distance, shortage of competent medical professionals, and lack of diagnostic facilities. This study proposes an efficient cloud-based smart health kiosk that facilitates the delivery of cost-effective, easy-to-access, and quality diagnostic services. The design of the kiosk involves the use of IoT enabled medical sensors (digital stethoscope, infrared thermometer, pulse oximeter, blood pressure measurement device, glucometer, ECG, and urinalysis dipstick reader) and edge computing gateway for capturing the data and pre-processing the acquired data. Telemedicine is used for establishing a video connection between the patient and remote physician. Medical data is transferred to the cloud storage through an HIPAA compliant network for long-term storage and initial triaging using artificial intelligence. After deployment at 50 rural areas in India serving 250,000 patients in 18 months, average travel time decreased from 32 km to 1.5 km and out-of-pocket costs were minimized by 68%. Patient satisfaction rate was recorded to be 94%.