iVital: A Mobile Health Expert System with a Wearable Vital Sign Analyzer

Vital sign monitoring is a core component of nursing care as information regarding ‘vital functions’ strengthen medical diagnoses. Consequently, various measurement devices have been proposed and utilized from wearable devices to custom engineered equipment. To contribute to the existing innovations of monitoring devices for vital signs, this study proposed a different variation of such a medical device by incorporating the principles of an expert system together with its own wearable vital sign analyzer. At this stage of the project, the device (subsequently referred to as iVital) was a proposal with a prototype as final the product. The primary goal of iVital is to provide both patients and healthcare experts to continuously monitor vital sign measurements remotely. Further, and most importantly, it integrated an expert system where other important data (e.g., patient history and medical records) detectearly signs of clinical deterioration. This work, albeit prefatory, is evidence of how expert systems can be used in healthcare.