A Remote Visiting and Monitoring System for Neonatal Intensive Care Units via Internet of Things

To meet the visiting needs of families of children in neonatal intensive care unit and reduce the burden of hospital management during the COVID-19 epidemic, we developed a remote visiting and monitoring system using the internet of things. The Raspberry Pi is used as the core hardware platform. The real-time signal of the bedside monitor is converted into a virtual camera, and is connected to the Raspberry Pi which has a real camera with CMOS Serial Interface (CSI). The frames of the two cameras are collected via FFmpeg technology, and then are pushed to the cloud server through Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). The video streams are then transferred and distributed via a Nginx server running RTMP protocol, and finally are displayed on the web page via the Flask framework. When tested, the system ran stably, and the real-time pictures from the camera and the bedside monitor screen in the hospital were clearly shown on a personal computer or a mobile phone in a remote distance out of the hospital, just by click the link of the associated web page. We think this system is helpful for families to remotely visit the babies anywhere any time, and it is also helpful for hospitals to reduce the human workload and the financial expenditure.