Design and implementation of a framework for monitoring patients in hospitals using wireless sensors in ad hoc...

Patients in hospital intensive care units (ICUs) have to be monitored constantly. Typically, unless the attending physician is at the bedside, he or she has no information of the patient's progress, and must be paged manually in case of emergencies. A far better system would be one that keeps the patient's information available to the doctor or nurse at all times, possibly through the use of a handheld device. The doctor would then be able to check on the patient's progress in real time. Should an emergency arise, the doctor would be notified directly by the monitoring system itself, saving valuable response time. This paper aims to set up an infrastructure for monitoring patients in hospital ICUs. An architectural framework and related protocols to support communication between the various components of such a system are presented. The prototyped product was successfully demonstrated to industry representatives, in November 2005, at Villanova University, PA.