Title :
Home-based monitoring of cardiac patients
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., South Carolina Univ., Columbia, SC, USA
Abstract :
The paper describes an ongoing effort towards the design of systems for home based monitoring of cardiac patients. The goal is to develop systems that could support early discharge of cardiac patients and enable their home based recuperation. Such systems could act as a virtual extension of the ICU/CCU systems in the hospital, enabling physicians to monitor patients at home, and giving them the ability to discharge patients earlier while continuing to monitor their recuperation progress. This concept could result in direct health care cost savings and improvement in the quality of medical care, especially in rural areas with limited access to cardiologists. Our first step towards this goal is a system that can send cardiac data from the patient to the physician via the Internet. The physician can perform data analysis and send reports back to the patient over the Internet. In order to provide a truly home based monitoring system, we plan to add to the current system the ability to transmit real time cardiac and blood pressure events over cellular telephone networks
Keywords :
Internet; cardiology; computerised monitoring; health care; medical computing; patient monitoring; ICU/CCU systems; Internet; blood pressure events; cardiac patient monitoring; cardiologists; cellular telephone networks; data analysis; early discharge; health care cost savings; home based monitoring; home based recuperation; hospital; medical care; physicians; rural areas; virtual extension; Back; Biomedical monitoring; Cardiology; Costs; Data analysis; Hospitals; Internet; Medical services; Patient monitoring; Real time systems;
Conference_Titel :
Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine, 1998. ITAB 98. Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Washington, DC
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-4973-3
DOI :
10.1109/ITAB.1998.674692