IARJSET ISSN (Online) 2393-8021

ISSN (Print) 2394-1588

International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering and Technology

ISO 3297:2007 Certified
Vol. 3, Issue 7, July 2016

Detection and Monitoring of Asthma Trigger

Factor using Zigbee
Miss. Anumeha Lal 1, Mr. Girish A. Kulkarni2
ME 2nd Year, North Maharashtra University, SSGB Engineering & Technology, Bhusawal, Maharashtra1
HOD of E&TC, North Maharashtra University, SSGB Engineering & Technology, Bhusawal, Maharashtra 2

Abstract: Asthma is one of the widespread chronic diseases. Firstly, the medical background of asthma is given.
Pathology and symptoms are presented. Asthma is a chronic condition that mostly affects adolescents. It is a condition
that requires continuous monitoring of the symptoms in order to provide an effective course of treatment. It also
requires a strict adherence to medication prescribed by the physician. However, the aim of this study is to develop a
system, which is based on a periodical data collected by the different sensors. There is no cure for asthma. Symptoms
can be prevented by monitoring factors which can trigger asthma attack. So it is very much needed that there should be
a system which can monitor air parameter on regular basis and warn the patient when these factor can trigger their
asthma attack.

Keywords: wireless sensors networks, air quality, asthma assessment, ZigBee.

I. INTRODUCTION II. PROBLEM STATEMENT

The primary objective of this project work is to develop a Asthma, a chronic health condition prevalent in children
flexible system characterized by low-cost sensing nodes can be characterized by breathlessness, chest tightness and
that assures robust and continuous monitoring of air coughing. An asthma attack can be triggered by a variety
conditions in order to analyse the asthma trigger factors. of factors including environmental conditions, intense
Asthma is a chronic condition that mostly affects physical activity, humidity and dust1. In the United States,
adolescents. It is a condition that requires continuous as of February 2010, 7 million children (10%) were
monitoring of the symptoms in order to provide an reported to be suffering from asthma2. This condition is
effective course of treatment. It also requires a strict generally more prevalent among adolescents in the age
adherence to medication prescribed by the physician. group of 11-17. Due to the high prevalence of asthma in
children and the difficulty involved in diagnosing the
However, the aim of this study is to develop a system, condition it becomes imperative to come up with
which is based on a periodical data collected by the technological solutions for continuous care and
different sensors. For the proposed system is designed management of patients with this chronic disease.
around a PIC microcontroller and different sensors,
Temperature, Humidity & gas sensor for gathering, III. OBJECTIVE
sending and receiving information from different sensors
and external servers. The aim of the architecture design is The objective of this project is to develop a system to
to provide an easier access to information and services, analyse the trigger factor of asthma and a device that can
better patient healthcare services, transparent and efficient use by asthma patients, which can perform multiple
use of healthcare resources, and a fast response by the functions that enable a physician to monitor the patient’s
hospital side in case of Asthma attack. condition and to provide continuous care. The different
functionalities in a point of care device that are considered
This system permits to establish correlations between the
vital in caring for patients with asthma are discussed
air quality parameters and the appearance of respiratory
below. The idea behind this work is to develop a point of
diseases such as asthma as part of environment medicine
care device which can ideally be integrated with an alarm
approach. After being processed the information and,
to remind the patients to take their medication and also a
depending of the results obtained, the system will display
memory which stores all the test results, patients’
the messages if their range is beyond the required limit.
perception of their condition and the regularity with which
In this way a self management system is designed for the inhaler is used so that the physicians can later use these
asthmatic patient. So the system is very efficient for data to accurately assess the condition of the patient.
patient as they can monitor their asthma level at their
residential place. People in villages having their financial IV. NEED
problem then for them the system can be installed to their
central clinic which can help them to diagnose their Asthma is one of the widespread chronic diseases. Rising
asthma at local place. prevalence increases the burden of personal disease

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 IARJSET ISSN (Online) 2393-8021
ISSN (Print) 2394-1588

International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering and Technology

ISO 3297:2007 Certified
Vol. 3, Issue 7, July 2016

management, financial expenditures and workload, both to carry out a vast range of tasks. They can be
on sides of patients and healthcare systems. According to programmed to be timers or to control a production line
the World Health Organization asthma is a serious public and much more. They are found in most electronic devices
health problem with over 100 million sufferers worldwide. such as alarm systems, computer control systems, phones,
Between 100 and 150 million people around the in fact almost any electronic device. Many types of PIC
globe suffer from asthma and this number is rising. World- microcontrollers exist, although the best are probably
wide, deaths from this condition have reached over found in the GENIE range of programmable
180,000 annually. India has an estimated 15-20 million microcontrollers. These are programmed and simulated by
asthmatics. In 2013, 242 million people globally had Circuit Wizard software. PIC Microcontrollers are
asthma up from 183 million in 1990. It caused about relatively cheap and can be bought as pre-built circuits or
489,000 deaths in 2013. Asthma is not just a public health as kits that can be assembled by the user.
problem for developed countries. In developing countries,
however, the incidence of the disease varies greatly. There D. Temperature Sensor
is no cure for asthma. Symptoms can be prevented by A temperature sensor is a device that gathers data
monitoring factors which can trigger asthma attack. So it concerning the temperature from a source and converts it
is very much needed that there should be a system which to a form that can be understood either by an observer or
can monitor air parameter on regular basis and warn the another device. These sensors come in many different
patient when these factor can trigger their asthma attack. forms and are used for a wide variety of purposes, from
simple home use to extremely accurate and precise
V. SYSTEM DESIGN scientific use. The LM35 is an integrated circuit sensor
that can be used to measure temperature with an electrical
A. System Architecture output proportional to the temperature (in oC) The LM35
The Asthma Monitoring System is designed around a PIC series are precision integrated-circuit temperature sensors,
microcontroller for gathering, sending and receiving whose output voltage is linearly proportional to the
information from different sensors and external servers. Celsius (Centigrade) temperature. The LM35 thus has an
The aim of the architecture design is to provide an easier advantage over linear temperature sensors calibrated in ˚
access to information and services, better patient Kelvin, as the user is not required to subtract a large
healthcare services, transparent and efficient use of constant voltage from its output to obtain convenient
healthcare resources, and a fast response by the hospital Centigrade scaling. The LM35 does not require any
side in case of Asthma attack. The most relevant features external calibration or trimming to provide typical
and application scenarios will be accurately described in accuracies. The LM35’s low output impedance, linear
the following sections. output, and precise inherent calibration make interfacing
to readout or control circuitry especially easy. It can be
B. Hardware Architecture used with single power supplies, or with plus and minus
The proposed system is designed by integrating the supplies.
following hardware modules shown in Fig. 3.1. As the
figure shows, the system consists of a PIC184520
microcontroller integrated with a sensor array
(Temperature sensor, Humidity sensor & Gas sensor)
using analog ports. The hardware unit is also connected to
a ZigBee-Modem using the RS-232 interface

Fig 2 Circuit diagram of LM35

E. Gas Sensor
Semiconductor sensors detect gases by a chemical reaction
that takes place when the gas comes in direct contact with
the sensor. Tin dioxide is the most common material used
in semiconductor sensors, and the electrical resistance in
the sensor is decreased when it comes in contact with the
Fig 1 Block Diagram of Proposed System monitored gas. Semiconductor sensors are commonly used
to detect hydrogen, oxygen, alcohol vapor, and harmful
C. PIC18F4520 Microcontroller gases such as carbon monoxide. One of the most common
PIC microcontrollers (Programmable Interface uses for semiconductor sensors is in carbon monoxide
Controllers) are electronic circuits that can be programmed sensors. They are also used in breathalyzers. Because the

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 IARJSET ISSN (Online) 2393-8021
ISSN (Print) 2394-1588

International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering and Technology

ISO 3297:2007 Certified
Vol. 3, Issue 7, July 2016

sensor must come in contact with the gas to detect it, others, humidity sensors are employed to provide an
semiconductor sensors work over a smaller distance than indication of the moisture levels in the environment.
infrared point or ultrasonic detectors. MQ2 flammable gas
and smoke sensor detects the concentrations of
combustible gas in the air and outputs its reading as an
analog voltage. The sensor can measure concentrations of
flammable gas of 300 to 10,000 ppm. The sensor can
operate at temperatures from -20 to 50°C and consumes
less than 150 mA at 5 V. Connecting five volts across the
heating (H) pins keeps the sensor hot enough to function
correctly. Connecting five volts at either the A or B pins
causes the sensor to emit an analog voltage on the other
pins. A resistive load between the output pins and ground
sets the sensitivity of the detector. Both configurations
have the same pin out consistent with the bottom
configuration. The resistive load should be calibrated for Fig 4 Humidity Sensor
your particular application using the equations in the
datasheet, but a good starting value for the resistor is 20 G. ZigBee
kΩ. ZigBee is the wireless language that everyday devices use
to connect to one another ZigBee is a wireless networking
standard that is aimed at remote control and sensor
applications which is suitable for operation in harsh radio
environments and in isolated locations. ZigBee technology
builds on IEEE standard 802.15.4 which defines the
physical and MAC layers. Above this, ZigBee defines the
application and security layer specifications enabling
interoperability between products from different
manufacturers. In this way ZigBee is a superset of the
802.15.4 specification. With the applications for remote
wireless sensing and control growing rapidly it is
estimated that the market size could reach hundreds of
millions of dollars as early as 2007. This makes ZigBee
Fig 3 Gas Sensor
technology a very attractive proposition for many
applications. The distances that can be achieved
F. Humidity Sensor
transmitting from one station to the next extend up to
Humidity is the presence of water in air. The amount of
about 70 metres, although very much greater distances
water vapour in air can affect human comfort as well as
may be reached by relaying data from one node to the next
many manufacturing processes in industries. The presence
in a network. The main applications for 802.15.4 are
of water vapour also influences various physical,
aimed at control and monitoring applications where
chemical, and biological processes. Humidity
relatively low levels of data throughput are needed, and
measurement in industries is critical because it may affect
with the possibility of remote, battery powered sensors,
the business cost of the product and the health and safety
low power consumption is a key requirement. Sensors,
of the personnel. Hence, humidity sensing is very
lighting controls, security and many more applications are
important, especially in the control systems for industrial
all candidates for the new technology.
processes and human comfort. Controlling or monitoring
humidity is of paramount importance in many industrial &
The data is transferred in packets. These have a maximum
domestic applications. In semiconductor industry,
size of 128 bytes, allowing for a maximum payload of 104
humidity or moisture levels needs to be properly
bytes. Although this may appear low when compared to
controlled & monitored during wafer processing. In
other systems, the applications in which 802.15.4 and
medical applications, humidity control is required for
ZigBee are likely to be used should not require very high
respiratory equipments, sterilizers, incubators,
data rates.
pharmaceutical processing, and biological products.
Humidity control is also necessary in chemical gas
purification, dryers, ovens, film desiccation, paper and
textile production, and food processing. In agriculture,
measurement of humidity is important for plantation
protection (dew prevention), soil moisture monitoring, etc.
For domestic applications, humidity control is required for
living environment in buildings, cooking control for
microwave ovens, etc. In all such applications and many Fig.5 ZigBee

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International Advanced Research Journal in Science, Engineering and Technology

ISO 3297:2007 Certified
Vol. 3, Issue 7, July 2016

H. Algorithm the system Zigbee module makes a bridge between the

-Initialize ADC,LCD sensor network and the database connectivity. Data from
-Initialize Zigbee,Serial COM port respiratory tests, imported using the developed MPLAB
-Initialize sensor module application permits to analyze the relationship between
-Monitor the sensor data using pulling asthma and air quality. The presented solution is useful to
- Read the ADC value for corresponding sensor analyze and detect asthma triggering factors and other
-Convert the read ADC value to ASCII code to display on respiratory diseases factors in indoor spaces. The
LCD information can be accessed anywhere which allows the
-Display on LCD users to know elements about risk condition for their
-Send through serial Zigbee Module respiratory health. As the future work is mentioned and
-on Receiver side Initialize Zigbee extension of the wireless sensor network using zigbee
-Receive data through Zigbee nodes can be possible. The algorithm can be modified to
-Set the Hyperterminal/Flash new capabilities to analyze more air compounds
-Set the COM port concentration measurements. Referring to the information
-Display data on HyperTerminal/Flash system side, in order to provide a more efficient alert
system, the warnings can be sent as a SMS to cell phone of
VI. RESULT users, or by email. The Enviogis web based information
system can be improved with new technologies that permit
This is one of the efficient methods to monitor the air to be accessed using mobile devices such as smart phones
quality parameters which can trigger asthma attack. As the or tablets. In Future scope it would be possible to
main objective of this project is to monitoring the air maintain the Database for the system we can design of
quality parameter, this has been implemented to monitor Data Logger like system which store the parameter on the
temperature, humidity and gas molecule particles present SD card or Hard Drive for future reference.
in the air.
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