Remote patient monitoring for improving outpatient care of patients at risk for sepsis

This work seeks to design and develop a remote monitoring platform for tracking indicators of sepsis with the goal of reducing hospital readmissions and mortality rates, and ultimately improving outpatient quality of care. Medicare reports spending $17.8 billion per year on avoidable readmissions, a leading cause of which is sepsis. Insufficient knowledge and improper training for postoperative care of discharged patients further enhances the importance of sepsis monitoring at home. Common indicators of sepsis include infection, elevated heart rate, elevated breathing rate, blood pressure, and fever. While these criteria can be easily tracked within the hospital, there exists no straightforward extension to the home setting because of the confounding effect of physical activity. Some of the challenges associated with remote monitoring for sepsis in discharged patients include the lower sensory quality of mobile biometric devices, the need to recognize activity in non-stationary patients, and the need to individualize the baseline criteria. In order to broaden the criteria to outpatients, this research considers the challenges of collecting and analyzing patient biometrics remotely using commercially available technology. As a result, we present a remote monitoring solution for early detection of sepsis in the outpatient setting.