A Development of Inpatient Monitoring System: A Case Study of Patong Hospital, Phuket, Thailand

Detecting the health condition of patients is an essential routine of the inpatient unit. In general, medical professionals routinely measure the status of a patient by monitoring the vital signs. In Thailand, the current practice is assessing each vital signs manually and log them into a paper-based form. This process put a lot of workload into the medical staff, especially the hospitals that have limited human resources. Besides, using the paper-based forms may cause misinterpretations that lead to the wrong diagnosis. Thus, an efficient way to record and monitor vital sign information is necessary for inpatient care. This paper presents the design and development of a vital sign recording and monitoring systems for the inpatient department of a small to medium-sized hospital. Nurses can use the vital sign recording system on a handheld computing device. The data visualization dashboard at the nurse center promotes the perception of the patient's condition. The real-time value-based notification technique has been applied to create interaction, lower the delay, and improve the quality of user experiences. The preliminary evaluation results have shown that our proposed system can leverage the effort of medical staff and enhance the quality of inpatient care.