An embedded reconfigurable architecture for patient-specific multi-paramater medical monitoring

A robust medical monitoring device should be able to provide intelligent diagnosis based on accurate analysis of physiological parameters in real-time. At the same time, such device must be able to adapt to the characteristics of a specific patient and desired diagnostic needs, and continue to operate even in presence of unexpected artifacts and accidental errors. A reconfigurable architecture is proposed for real-time assessment of individual's health status based on development of a patient-specific health index and online analysis and fusion of multi-parameter physiological signals. This is achieved by static configuration of processing elements and communication blocks in the architecture based on the patient's diagnostic needs. The proposed architecture is prototyped as a single integrated device on an FPGA platform and is evaluated using multi-parameter data from intensive care units (ICUs). Three representative test cases of concurrently analyzing Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, and Electrocardiogram (ECG) data from MIMIC database are presented. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in eliminating false alarms caused by patient movements, monitor noise, or imperfections in the detection schemes.