Mechanical Ventilation Monitoring: Development of a Network Data Acquisition System

Abstract

Mechanical ventilator (MV) is a vital life support machine for respiratory failure patients in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Critical and beneficial information on patient’s breathing pattern can be obtained from the ventilator for research studies in a form of ventilator waveform data (VWD). However, imperfect data collection system and lack of Electronic Health Record system integration has deterred the study of VWD to improve patient’s treatment. Furthermore, data acquisition of VWD is not easily accessible and cost-prohibitive to deploy. Therefore, current studies are limited to small samples of breathing cycle, despite continuously changing patient’s respiratory state during the day. Hence, this proposed system allows constant monitoring of patient’s ventilation data and real-time VWD visualization on mobile devices. This system consists of a data acquisition device (DAQ) to acquire VWD and a mobile web application to display patient’s breathing condition in real time. In addition, the collected VWD data are stored securely in network attached storage and onto cloud storage to prevent data loss. This framework has been successfully tested with MV attached with test lung. This proposed system can potentially expedite research studies by providing a better data collection and management specifically in the clinical environment.