Patient Monitoring System

Intensive care units (ICU) constitute one of the most labor-intensive sectors in hospitals requiring constant monitoring of patients’ conditions. Examples of the vital signs frequently monitored are temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, which are mainly analog data. These repetitive monitoring processes are amenable to automation. Increasingly, the automation of clinical operations is becoming an important and active research area in computer science. Typically, this research area deals with real time problems with embedded system playing a significant role. A basic feature in embedded system is the micro-controller that is dedicated to handling one task efficiently. In addition, database analysis occupies an important position in the system. With the advent of the Internet, the Web or on-line monitoring approach is becoming popular and successful in handling such real time systems due to the platform independence provided. Although some of these real-time systems take advantage of client/server structure, they are mostly limited by vendor specific nature of the communication protocols. 

Technically, the main thrust of a patient monitoring system (PMS) is to extract and display information on the patients’ vital signs, and sound off alarm in the event of critical conditions. PMS can be integrated with the World Wide Web that is not vendor specific, but platform independent (using standard communication protocols/HTML). This approach allows access to other information sources such as hospital information system (HIS) or other remote medical databases (MEDLINE). Another important aspect of such system is the generation of alarms based on the trends and rules provided by experts. Smart alarming algorithms provided by artificial intelligence techniques could be employed here. Furthermore, security issues arising from the open architecture of the Web is given special consideration. Access by authentication and several encryption algorithms (e.g. RC4) are supported in order to improve security of such systems.  

In all, automation of clinical operations is gaining recognition due to its efficiency and cost reductive effects. More and more clinicians are using personal computers making location, independent access to patient data, multi-platform support, and the use of standard communication protocols more meaningful. Yet crucial for the decision support, patient monitoring systems must integrate data generated in ICUs with other data sources such as a hospital information system (HIS). Despite recorded progress in such systems, there is need to further understand the basics of such systems, by studying easily discernible systems in the laboratory, using emerging technologies such as interfacing data-logging-unit to the Web. This research holds the potential of a significant insight into such systems and it weaves together diverse fields such as Artificial intelligence, Web Technology, Database, Embedded Systems, Networking, Cryptography and Software Engineering.