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Chapter 5
SMART:
Mobile Patient Monitoring in an
Emergency Department
Esteban Pino
Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile
Dorothy Curtis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Thomas Stair
Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Lucila Ohno-Machado
University of California San Diego, USA
INTRODUCTION
As technology advances, there are more options
available for pervasive monitoring. Sensor minia-
turization, wireless communication and increasing
processing power in smaller packages allow more
efficient, reliable and convenient systems, at least
from the end-user perspective. In healthcare, one
of the main driving forces behind ubiquitous com-
puting is the increasing need to move patient care
from the hospital to non-standard settings such as
homes, nursing homes, improvised waiting areas,
hazardous locations or the battlefield. For at-risk
ABSTRACT
Patient monitoring is important in many contexts: at mass-casualty disaster sites, in improvised emergency
wards, and in emergency room waiting areas. Given the positive history of use of monitoring systems in
the hospital during surgery, in the recovery room, or in an intensive care unit, the authors sought to use
recent technological advances to enable patient monitoring in more diverse circumstances: at home,
while traveling, and in some less well-monitored areas of a hospital. This chapter presents the authors’
experiences in designing, implementing and deploying a wireless disaster management system proto-
type in a real hospital environment. In addition to a review of related systems, the sensors, algorithms
and infrastructure used in our implementation are presented. Finally, general guidelines for ubiquitous
methodologies and tools are shared based on the lessons learned from the actual implementation.
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-765-7.ch004