Indoor Telemedicine in Hospital: a PDA-based Flexible Solution for Wireless Monitoring and Database Integration

An integrated information flexible system is proposed in this paper for indoor medical applications. The system is intended to provide clinicians with a portable device enabling to discover and recognize patients and easily access their electronic record in a fast and secure way for consultation or updating. Moreover the developed solution allows communication with medical equipments for wireless monitoring of patients biosignals. Requirements for such a system are therefore high flexibility and mobility, as well as fast and secure wireless communication. These features were achieved combining the use of Bluetooth technology with a Personal Digital Assistant, which was provided with a multilayer software architecture to allow easy access to Hospital database and to communicate with external medical devices. A prototype was also realized and the testing phase has indicated good performances on both patient discovery and wireless monitoring.