Physiologic monitors
Physiologic monitors are smart devices that can be attached a patient’s body or even integrated into their garments. This can create a personal network with wireless transmission of physiologic monitoring. Any data can be sent to computer, allowing remote monitoring of real time data.
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Advantages
Advantages of such monitoring systems could:
- Allow early detection of vital sign deterioration
- Alert responders to critical situations
- Enhance connectedness among patients and loved ones, providing reassurance to family and maintaining dignity and independence for patients
- Identify correlations between health and lifestyle
- Battlefield monitoring of soldiers
- Improve sports related conditioning
- Provide providers with transformative real time physiologic data
- Expand health care access to rural areas and developing countries where cellular access is often the only communication method available
Applications
Two such devices currently being developed and tested include the LifeGuard wireless physiologic monitor and the HealthGear real time physiologic monitoring system.
Lifeguard
The LifeGuard system is being developed by NASA to monitor the health of astronauts during space flights and extravehicular activities. Capabilities of the LifeGuard include:
- Heart rate
- Systolic and diastolic blood pressure
- Activity, (3-axis acceleration)
- ECG, (2 channels)
- Temperature
- Respiration rate
- Pulse oximetry
HealthGear
The HealthGear system is being developed by Microsoft, it is designed to be integrated into clothing and not only collects real time data but also performs algorithmic interpretation of the data for detecting sleep apnea episodes.
- Heart Rate
- Respiration rate
- Pulse oximetry
- Plethysmographic signal
- Modular format to allow addition of additional components
References
- Emil Jovanov, Dejan Raskovic, John Price, John Chapman, Anthony Moore, Abhishek Krishnamurthy. Patient Monitoring Using Personal Area Networks of Wireless Intelligent Sensors.
- Nuria Oliver & Fernando Flores-Mangas. HealthGear: A Real-time Wearable System forMonitoring and Analyzing Physiological .
- Signals.http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/technology-onepagers/life-guard.html.
