Abstract
The MEDIcal WARNing (MEDIWARN) system continuously and automatically monitors the vital parameters of pre-intensive care hospitalized patients and, thanks to an intelligent processing system, provides the medical teams with a better understanding of their patients’ clinical condition, thus enabling a prompt reaction to any change. Since the hospital units generally lack a wired infrastructure, a wireless network is required to collect sensor data in a server for processing purposes. This work presents the MEDIWARN communication system, addressing both the network architecture and a simple, lightweight and configurable routing protocol that fits the system requirements, such as the ability to offer path redundancy and mobility support without significantly increasing the network workload and latency. The novel protocol, called the MultiPath Routing Protocol for MEDIWARN (MP-RPM), was therefore designed as a solution to support low-latency reliable transmissions on a dynamic network while limiting the network overhead due to the control messages. The paper describes the MEDIWARN communication system and addresses the experimental performance evaluation of an implementation in a real use-case scenario. Moreover, the work discusses a simulative assessment of the MEDIWARN communication system performance obtained using different routing protocols. In particular, the timeliness and reliability results obtained by the MP-RPM routing protocol are compared with those obtained by two widely adopted routing protocols, i.e., the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) and the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV).
Highlights
The study and analysis of vital parameters of hospitalized patients are extremely important in clinical medicine [1], and multiple research projects aim to use novel technologies to support clinical practice [2]
MEDIWARN realizes a system for the continuous and automated monitoring of the vital parameters of patients through the use of a peripheral sensory system that feeds into an intelligent warning system
To highlight the impact of the routing protocol on the MEDIWARN network performance, we address a comparative assessment of the average Round Trip Time (RTT) and PLR obtained by the MEDIWARN communication system using three different routing protocols, i.e., the MultiPath Routing Protocol for MEDIWARN (MP-RPM) presented here, the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) [11] and the Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector Routing (DSDV) [12]
Summary
The study and analysis of vital parameters of hospitalized patients are extremely important in clinical medicine [1], and multiple research projects aim to use novel technologies to support clinical practice [2]. The evolution of the patient condition in the pre-intensive care unit is essential to ensure early and prompt reaction on critical patients who could experience a progressive clinical deterioration For this reason, the continuous monitoring of the patients’ vital signs (e.g., body temperature, blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, etc.) is needed [2,5,6]. The collected data are sent to a central station and analyzed in real time Such an analysis, which includes mathematical models and advanced fuzzy logic (that exploits specific rules based on medical expertise), provides interpretative elements on the clinical status of patients and its evolution well before the actual deterioration of the vital functions that would trigger the alert according to solutions such as the Early Warning Score (EWS) [9] criteria. By alerting medical staff when a patient would be starting to get worse, the MEDIWARN system allows earlier intervention with a higher chance of success in treating a patient
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