The Development of New Function for ICU/CCU Remote Patient Monitoring System Using a 3G Mobile Phone and Evaluations of the System

Telemedicine plays a more and more important role in supporting doctors and taking care of people's daily health. Recently, the 3G mobile phone progressed rapidly. It is possible to use the 3G mobile phone for telemedicine. In this paper, new functions are developed for ICU/CCU Remote Patient Monitoring System using a 3G mobile phone and the system was evaluated. This system consists of three parts: Patients Monitoring System, Remote Information Server which are built in the hospital and Java-enable 3 G mobile phones. Patients Monitoring System consists of bedside monitors in ICU/CCU and central monitors installed in the place where medical staffs gather. Commonly, several patients' information which was measured with bedside monitor can be stored in the database of central monitor. Remote Information Server plays an important part. It can extract specific data from central monitor and send it to the 3G mobile phone. Via the Internet and 3G mobile network, the Java application on the 3G mobile phone receives the data and displays the visual information on the screen of the mobile phone to the doctor. Even from the outside of the hospital, by using this system the doctor can monitor the vital biosignals of patients in ICU/CCU, such as ECG, SpO2, RESP, and so on. The doctors can monitor graph trend data as well as real-time data, list rend data and patient information. Graph trend application is useful to watch the past of change of the patient. This application took about 23 seconds till the doctor displayed graph trend data. However, this delay time was decreased for 8 seconds by compressing data with algorisms. The proposed system can provide high level patient monitoring to doctors and do a powerful supporting to save patient's lives when doctors are outside the hospital.