Taking Care of Mobile Patients

Roland Piquepaille writes "After a patient has been hospitalized for a surgical intervention, he usually wants to return to his normal life. But doctors would like to monitor him to be sure that the operation was successful. How can they manage this without being too intrusive? In "Health Care Monitoring of Mobile Patients," Italian researchers offer a three-layer networking solution. First, a body area sensor network would continuously record your cardiac activity or your body temperature. A second level would involve a home sensor network, including for example a PC wirelessly receiving this information. Finally, this home network would be able to alert an hospital network if needed. Right now, this whole idea is at the proof-of-concept level, but it really looks promising."

Comments

patient added to Two Year Transplant waiting list.

[ABeowulfCluster]

There's no cure for an unhealthy lifestyle. A heart monitor aint gonna cure that.

Go on.. Eat that cheeseburger, fries and jumbo coke and sit on your butt all day.

Re:Similar to astronaut montioring

[ColdWetDog]

Err, umm. Aside from highly trained persons in a research environment, this appears to be a technology looking for a problem. I am a doctor and I cannot find much of a use for wiring up patients to cardiorespiratory monitors at home. We do this in the hospital because we're worried that they might do something bad sometime soon. If they're stable enough to be sent home, they're stable enough to have thier vital signs monitored by 1) the patient (weight and temperature are rather easy and low tech 2) a nurse (trained in doing vital signs, and much more importantly, a global assesement of the patient that hardware has yet to even try or 3) the extraordinarily complex technologic solution of the telephone ("Hi Mr. Smith, how do you feel today?"). If I'm so worried that the patient's heart will flat line, I'm not sending them home..... This is just another one of Roland's silly bits of "reporting". About half of the Slashdot readership should be able to cobble this up on a weekend (proof of concept indeed...). You could even use Linux. And stop worrying about all of the germs. Yes, they are out there, no they aren't jumping out of the walls to eat you. Where did you get those numbers from? Roland? Fox? The Germ Fairy? They make absolutely no sense. Just try to stay out of the ICU and you'll be fine. Put down that cigarette and for god's sake, quit sitting on your butt and reading Slashot. Go outside and play. Shoo! Shoo!

Re:Sorry to say this

[sessamoid]

Here's a great example from my own experience (Disclaimer: I am a physician who works in Emergency Services). Home blood-pressure monitoring devices are widespread now, such that many patients maintain these devices in their own homes. I sometimes see a half-dozen patients a day who present because they got a "high" number on their blood pressure machine.

I know exactly what you mean about these patients. The way I've started dealing with them is to take a piece of paper and draw a quick graph that shows the normal variation in various vital signs, particularly blood pressure. "See, this is when you get angry, this is right after your morning coffee hits, this is you right now because you're stuck in the ER with lots of sick people and expecting bad news, etc. Then I explain to them that they may have caught their blood pressure at one of those high peaks, even though their blood pressure is fine overall.

It can also help to draw a hypothetical line, presumably above where the patient happens to be at the moment (say 200 mmHg), at which point I would explain that it deserves immediate attention.

It's easier to counter their concern over a hard, concrete number when you visually show them the normal variation in a hard, concrete manner.

Re:What about when the patient is not home

[Bishop923]

Three big reasons I could see:
1) Signal availabilty: If you live in areas with poor or no reception you're out of luck. Also in larger-scale emergency situations cells have been known to be overloaded.

2) Reliability: Something like this needs to run 24/7 without a problem. Home networks can be hardened with good hardware and backup power sources. Accidentally breaking the phone goes from being a temporary nuisance to a possibly fatal mistake.

3) Cost: Even if it only takes 10 seconds to transmit the data most cellphone plans count that as a minute. Lets be conservative and say that there only needs to be a transmission every 5 minutes or so, thats 12 minutes an hour, or 288 a day. Depending on your cellphone contract it might be cheaper to hire a nurse to follow you around :-)

I though the idea was

[Jozer99]

I thought that the whole idea was that the patient was there in case their heart suddenly stopped after surgery. While a home sensor system like this would TELL the doctors it happened, there would not be much they could do about it for the 5 minutes that it takes an amublance to get there. If the patient is in the hospital, someone with a defibulator would be there in seconds.
Can't people take a day or two off for a triple bypass anymore? IT isn't like you are isolated from the world. Many hosipitals now have computer terminals that you can use, and free WiFi if you want to use your own. Not to mention telephones.