A telemedicine approach for hypertension care

A telemedicine system (TS) has been developed to record and assess blood pressure (BP) profiles along the clock during long time spans for a wide and cost effective population coverage. The components of this TS are: (a) the patient unit (PU), (b) the BP workstation (BP-WS), and (c) the communication link (CL). The PU provides the interface of the TS to the potential telemedicine hypertension groups. An integral system is developed to quantitatively evaluate not only BP variation, but also associated environmental interacting factors, to allow: (1) the reduction of variability when assessing the systematic daily variations of BP; and (2) the assessment of the changes in the BP profiles induced by specific factors that could be of interest for the differential diagnosis of BP alteration. The BP-WS takes care of the PU and contains all the facilities to make the medical expertise and resources at the health care center available at the PU end. PU and WS are connected through the CL