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New Trends in Patient Monitoring

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Disease Management and Health Outcomes

Abstract

The monitoring of vital signs is a basic task that has been carried out on patients that are admitted into specialized units, such as coronary care units, intensive care units and operating rooms. There is now a good deal of interest in the ever-increasing possibility of such monitoring being extended further, outside the hospital setting (e.g. to the patient’s home). We point out some of the aspects that have most significantly affected the evolution of monitoring systems, and identify some of the most important lines of research and improvement: endowing systems with greater intelligence (conditioned to a good degree by considerable advances at the level of sub-symbolic processing); the introduction of standards for the representation and transmission of monitoring information; ubiquity, in both the possibility of monitoring patients in any location and situation, and the capability of accessing this monitoring information. We end by presenting a line of research into intelligent ubiquitous monitoring developed by the authors.

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Notes

  1. According to 1998 data, just six companies controlled 70% of the world’s patient instrumentation market ($US2200 million): Agilent (a division of Hewlett-Packard), SpaceLabs Medical, Marquette (a division of General Electric), Nellcor (a division of Mallinckrodt), Siemens and Datex-Ohmeda (a division of Instrumentarium) [source: http://www.virtualanesthesia-textbook.com/vat/monitoring.html#standard].

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by Spanish Comisión Interministerial para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (CICyT) and Xunta de Galicia under projects TIC2000-0873-C02-01 and PGIDT00PXI20612PR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Intelligent Systems Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Senén Barro B.S. and Ph.D. (Professor), Jesús Presedo, Paulo Félix, Daniel Castro & Jose Antonio Vila

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  1. Senén Barro B.S. and Ph.D.
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  2. Jesús Presedo
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  3. Paulo Félix
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  4. Daniel Castro
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  5. Jose Antonio Vila
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Correspondence to Senén Barro B.S. and Ph.D..

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Barro, S., Presedo, J., Félix, P. et al. New Trends in Patient Monitoring. Dis-Manage-Health-Outcomes 10, 291–306 (2002). https://doi.org/10.2165/00115677-200210050-00003

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