Real-time monitoring of patients on remote sites

In this paper, we present a real-time patient monitoring system, which enables medical doctors to watch their patients on a remote site, to monitor their vital signs and to give them some advice for first-aid treatments. The system consists of three service objects: Monitoring Information Service (MIS), Vital Sign Monitoring Service (VSMS) and Multimedia Consulting Service (MCS). Through the MIS, medical doctors can get information about the patients currently under monitoring, including their names, ages, genders, symptoms, current main complaints and current locations. The VSMS enables medical doctors to monitor in real-time patients' vital signs such as electrocardiogram (ECG), respiration, temperature, blood oxygen saturation (SpO/sub 2/), invasive blood pressure (IBP), and non-invasive blood pressure (NIBP). It also generates alarms when the patients are likely to be in a critical situation. The MCS provides a real-time multimedia desktop conferencing facility for watching patients and instructing attendants to administer some first-aid treatment. We carried out some experiments according to two different scenarios. The intensive patient monitoring service was functioning well in a 100 Base-T Ethernet LAN environment.