A Smart, Low Cost, Wearable Technology for Remote Patient Monitoring

Medical errors are one of the major causes of preventable deaths globally. The common causes of this error are miscommunication of information and delay in treatment because of a delay in transmission of clinical information to the doctors. This delay is mainly because of the manual nature of current practices and large patient to nurse ratio. The neonatology department faces major issues in this regard as ill and/or premature new-born infants require constant monitoring to ensure the levels of certain parameters (vital signs) remain within a particular range in order to avoid life threatening or organ damaging situations. To address this issue, an automated system to continuously measure three important vital signs (e.g, temperature, pulse rate, and pulse oxygen concentration) and to automatically indicate clinically significant situations is presented here. This system measures three vital signs using wearable sensors and communicates the data wirelessly with an accuracy of 0.1 degree Centigrade temperature, 0.1 percent oxygen saturation and 0.2 beats per minute pulse rate. An alarm is generated if parameters are out of the safe range. The autonomous and low cost system can successfully aide hospital staff, eliminate risks of human error in the emergency communication system.