Home-based monitoring of cardiac patients

The paper describes an ongoing effort towards the design of systems for home based monitoring of cardiac patients. The goal is to develop systems that could support early discharge of cardiac patients and enable their home based recuperation. Such systems could act as a virtual extension of the ICU/CCU systems in the hospital, enabling physicians to monitor patients at home, and giving them the ability to discharge patients earlier while continuing to monitor their recuperation progress. This concept could result in direct health care cost savings and improvement in the quality of medical care, especially in rural areas with limited access to cardiologists. Our first step towards this goal is a system that can send cardiac data from the patient to the physician via the Internet. The physician can perform data analysis and send reports back to the patient over the Internet. In order to provide a truly home based monitoring system, we plan to add to the current system the ability to transmit real time cardiac and blood pressure events over cellular telephone networks.