A new shared care telemedical solution dedicated to elderly patient nursing services for remote GP decision support

Thanks to the development of homecare facilities, elderly prefer to stay at home, and the age at which they are admitted in retirement homes is steadily increasing. As a result, a very large number of these persons are going to live in such dedicated centers because they have several health problems and need a daily assistance. But, a great number of these institutions for the elderly do not necessarily include medical services with a permanent on-site physician. These citizens/patients may be located in isolated geographic areas and sometimes need a GP intervention within less than two hours. In this context, we have designed a telemedical solution, called Tele-Nurse, based on a medical trolley equipped with several sensors (ECG, blood pressure, weight scale, SaO2, glucometer, videoconference) connected to a laptop which allows to collect and transmit the data to the GP via a J2EE server and a MySQL database. In this paper, we describe the global architecture which has been implemented and the various models that have been designed to support the user requirements, the use-case scenarios and the functions of the core system.