Persisting Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Monitoring Data in HDF5

Intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring data is of critical importance for clinical decision-making, but due to the large amount of recorded data, monitoring data is often only stored for short time periods in the clinical routine and not permanently stored for research. Archiving ICU monitoring data can help researchers develop new models to improve patient care of critically ill patients. This paper presents a solution to archive monitoring data using the Hierarchical Data Format version 5 (HDF5). With HDF5 the data is stored efficiently and easily accessible within a single file. 3,295 ICU monitoring sessions from three ICUs at Hannover Medical School have been recorded and archived since April 2025, containing 54,864 hours of raw data using 640 GB of storage capacity. The results show that persisting routine ICU monitoring data in HDF5 is feasible with near-zero data loss.