Challenges on real-time monitoring of patients through the Internet

Real-time remote monitoring of patients aims at improving and facilitating the accessibility to data about the vital signals of hospitalized patients, or patients that need to be closely monitored while at their own homes, by medical care professionals. By resorting to remote monitoring systems, the need for clinical staff to physically move next to each patient to supervise their clinical condition is reduced. This paper focuses on the key issues and challenges faced in the design and implementation of a distributed remote patient monitoring system using the Internet as communication platform, while describing some of the technologies that can be employed for this purpose. To optimize the systems' usability by medical care professionals, intuitive interfaces were developed using Web technologies, with an Internet browser as the only tool required to access the system. The study demonstrated that data updating based on database pooling system (periodic queries) is not the optimal solution, as the resulting system is not scalable. Also, monitoring several patients simultaneously (on the same browser) requires considerable processing at the client machine, particularly in the case of ECG signals.