A framework for supporting emergency messages in wireless patient monitoring

摘要

Patient monitoring is becoming a requirement for offering a better healthcare to an increasing number of patients in nursing homes and hospitals. During the monitoring, vital signs of patients could fluctuate significantly and/or match certain undesirable patterns and therefore “alerts” or emergency messages must be delivered to healthcare professionals. In this paper, we address how patient monitoring, specifically emergency messages, can be supported over wireless ad hoc network formed among patients' devices. The framework describes a wireless patient monitoring system that includes patient monitoring devices, routing protocols and information presentation for vitals signs and parameters. This involves a series of decisions in obtaining and processing vital signs, routing over networks, and delivering to healthcare professionals, who must make suitable medical decisions on patients' healthcare needs. Additionally, several design enhancements to improve the quality and coverage of wireless patient monitoring are presented. The performance results for the proposed ad hoc network based architecture show that reliable message delivery and low monitoring delays can be achieved by using multicast or broadcast-based routing schemes. The proposed monitoring architecture is shown to be scalable and the cognitive load on healthcare professionals is found to be dependent on routing protocols and reliability requirement of emergency messages. The proposed work can be extended to provide personalized healthcare services to people in nursing homes, assisted living, home, and while being mobile.