Ubiquitous patient monitoring and smart alert generation in an intensive care unit supported by low cost Tablet PC based automation system powered through open source software and hardware platforms

Abstract

Effective critical care administration is a very important aspect in healthcare. This requires mechanisms for ubiquitous monitoring and smart alert generation systems. The conventional systems in many hospitals are not able to cope up with this requirement. So that medication and other required actions will be getting delayed making life difficult for a patient. To address these issues, a Tablet PC based system prototype focussed on ICU based workflows is under development. Designing and developing Apps which can provide better solutions for clinical data entry, patient monitoring and meaningful alert generation is also in pipeline. The clinical data entry can be made easier with the help of a Tablet PC which offers a number of possibilities for organised data entry. Once the data is available, forms, charts, graphs etc can be generated easily without much manual intervention. Interfacing sensor devices to the central server makes monitoring and analysis automated and ubiquitous. Another important aspect is the way in which alert generation is made. In existing systems alerts are generated based on hard limits set by the clinical staff. There is a need to develop a more comprehensive system that holistically looks at all available information about the situation before generating an alert. Towards this, it should continuously monitor all vital signals available and evaluate the cross functional effects between them before arriving at the seriousness of the conditions leading to more meaningful alerts. The mode of alert delivery can be made context aware making use of existing technologies. The most appealing part of this work is that only open source platforms are used both in hardware and software domains.