Preliminary evaluation of a wireless remote monitoring system for home mechanical ventilation

Abstract

Patients who have acute respiratory failure and who have not responded to other treatment options can benefit from using a treatment, called Home Mechanical Ventilation. In order to allow the remote patient monitoring, in the last few years several tele-monitoring systems have been introduced, but most of them usually do not allow real-time services, are based on a wired connection, have their own proprietary serial communication protocol implemented and some ventilation parameters are not always measured. In order to reduce the above quoted drawbacks, in this work we report the development of a novel wireless remote monitoring system for long-term home-based ventilation therapy. The proposed system is based on the real-time monitoring of the main physical quantities involved during home-care ventilation and is developed in order to allow observation of different remote therapy units everywhere located in different places of a city, region or country. The developed remote patient monitoring system has been successfully tested by means of spirometric trials and, especially, by means of experimental tests carried out with pulmonary ventilators typically used to support sick patients.