Purpose
The aim of this project was the development of a system,
focused on Post Interventional Radiology (PIR) patient-monitoring,
after discharge to home-care.
The system allows for quasi real-time vital- and audiovisual data monitoring and transmission over IP and patient-care management and documentation.
The driving forces for adopting decentralized systems of health care provision are:
First,
the fusion of Biomedical Technology,
Informatics and Medical Decision-making into the modern Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS).
Second,
the population ageing and the escalation of hospital costs.
Home-care and institutional...
Methods and Materials
In order to accommodate for the lack of sufficient medical supervision in Home-Care environment,
we have developed a low-cost prototype solution for monitoring basic physiological parameters,
at home.
The present paper describes the implementation of a wearable and wireless remote-monitoring system of vital parameters for LTC,
post operative or post interventional Radiology patients.
Recorded physiology parameters are transmitted through a digital wireless link to a portable computer.
The portable computer’s main tasks are:
First to collect and present received data;
Second to provide an interface...
Results
Technical details of the Wearable module
The heart of the wearable module is the Parallax Propeller microcontroller (μC).
The controller is designed with 8 cores running at 80MHz.
The multi-core μC can run parallel tasks simultaneously.
Our application requires parallel data acquisition,
signal processing,
wireless data transmission and display.
The module has a 4 channel 10-bit ADC,
sampled at 1.2 kHz (300 Hz per channel),
and a 2-channel DAC.
A custom designed for the project version of the open hardware architecture of Propeller Board of...
Conclusion
The adoption of remotely controlled Home-care information systems that create paperless EHR,
seems to be inevitable in contemporary health-care environment and the developed system is our contribution,
towards this direction.
However,
there is always the risk of “information pollution”,
by the data-overload that all monitoring systems and their eventually associated electronic records can generate,
concerning both,
their data archiving and safeguarding process.
On the other hand,
increased technical and administrative regulations,
aiming to improve quality,
could also create an obstacle to achieving the primary goal...
References
OECD URL: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/,
search results for "home care",
last accessed Aug.
2012.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention URL: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nnhsd/Estimates/nnhs/Estimates_Diagnoses_Tables.pdf#Table33b,
Table 33B,
Last accessed Aug.
2012.
I.
Korhonen,
J.
Parkka,
M.
Van Gils.
Health monitoring in the home of the future.
IEEE EMB 22 pp 66–73,
2003.
C.
N.
Scanaill,
S.
Carew,
P.
Barralon,
.
Noury,
Declan Lyons and Gerard M.
Lyons,
A Review of Approaches to Mobility Telemonitoring of the Elderly in Their Living Environment,
Annals of Biomedical Engineering Volume 34,
Number 4 (2006),pp...