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Top1. Introduction And Background
Among top ten causes of death in the world, heart disease has remained the top major killers during the past decade (The top ten causes of death, 2021). In the Middle Eastern countries especially in Iran, heart disease (IHD) is placed as the first among the top causes of mortality (Sarrafzadegan et al., 2013). Moreover, the largest causes of death in developed countries is CHD and it is one of leading causes of disease burden in developing countries like Malaysia (Augustine & Keikhosrokiani, 2021; Gaziano et al., 2010). Correct diagnosis of heart disease should be taken in the early stage in order to avoid problems in future. Some patients, relatives or caretakers will have the difficulty and will not be able to find the nearest medical points during emergency situations, because they might not know there is a medical point nearby. Sometimes if we dial up to emergency centres to report emergency and request for emergency care, the emergency centres might not know the exact location of patients seeking for help and they may fail to send an ambulance at the correct time. Because of this delay or misconceptions of locations, this may also cause unwanted situations to occur. Therefore, there is need to develop ubiquitous medical systems to monitor heart disease patients remotely (Lo et al., 2011).
Nowadays the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offers effective and reliable remote medical services to patients by interconnecting available medical resources. A telemetric system based on Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) enables delivering biomedical data and sharing medical knowledge over a long distance using telecommunication to prevent chronic diseases (Keikhosrokiani, 2021a; Keikhosrokiani et al., 2018; Novo et al., 2017; Subash et al., 2021). As the computer-based patient record system suffered from lack of mobility, bulky and obtrusive hardware, mobile devices are deployed in healthcare (Hameed et al., 2016; Pattichis et al., 2002). Therefore, Location-Based Services (LBS) can be added to IoMT based telemedicine systems to overcome lack of mobility in medical systems. It can increase the visibility and automation of IoMT medical solutions to assist patient to search about nearby doctors or health centres and facilitating doctors to check information about patient’s health issues remotely and to track patient’s current location in case of emergency situation (Kizhakkepurayil et al., 2010). A Location-aware IoMT-based Information System (LIoMTIS) for prevention of heart disease, monitoring Hypertension and Arrhythmia patients and assistant in emergency can be useful. Therefore, iHeart would be a right solution to help patients to get emergency care during emergencies. iHeart is considered as a location-based Internet of Things (IoMT) based information system which interconnects medical resources and computing devices via internet to enable them to send and receive data (Keikhosrokiani et al., 2018; Keikhosrokiani et al., 2012). In order to use iHeart (Figure 1), patient needs to wear a Bluetooth wrist monitoring device called iHealth. Patient’s blood pressure and heart rate will be measured by iHealth along with patient current location will be transferred to the patient’s Smartphone and from Smartphone to iHealth cloud occasionally. The record of patient’s data including blood pressure, heart rate and his/her current location will be saved in medical centre’s database. If patient faced any problem, medical centre will contact the nearest hospital to the patient’s current location for sending ambulance and further treatment procedures. The nearest hospital are listed in the database and tagged based on their ellipse codes. If patient is conscious, medical system can navigate him/her to the nearest hospital or nearest ellipse. iHeart was developed and evaluated in Telemedicine Innovative Challenge which was part of “The First Malaysian Telemedicine Conference” (Keikhosrokiani, 2019, 2020; Keikhosrokiani et al., 2018; Keikhosrokiani et al., 2020; Keikhosrokiani et al., 2012). One of the main novelty and uniqueness of iHeart is the ellipse model for location tracking and navigating patient to the nearest hospitals. In addition, using iHealth device provide enables users to measure patient’s heart rate and blood pressure more accurately and use of iHealth cloud createsan opportunity to have rela-time service and a faster data transmission from patient to healthcare providers.