Network architecture for global biomedical monitoring service

Most of the patients who are in hospitals and, increasingly, patients controlled remotely from their homes, at-home monitoring, are continuously monitored in order to control their evolution. The medical devices used up to now, force the sanitary staff to go to the patients' room to control the biosignals that are being monitored, although in many cases, patients are in perfect conditions. If patient is at home, it is he or she who has to go to the hospital to take the record of the monitored signal. New wireless technologies, such as BlueTooth and WLAN, make possible the deployment of systems that allow the display and storage of those signals in any place where the hospital intranet is accessible. In that way, unnecessary displacements are avoided. This paper presents a network architecture that allows the identification of the biosignal acquisition device as IP network nodes. The system is based on a TCP/IP architecture which is scalable and avoids the deployment of a specific purpose network.