Remote Patient Monitoring of Patients with Complex Medical Conditions

Remote patient monitoring is frequently used to monitor patients with chronic disease, but patients are often only monitored for a single disease (CHF, COPD, diabetes) using systems designed to monitor only parameters for that disease. However many patients have multiple diseases that must be managed together; systems need to be designed to monitor a multiplicity of parameters. Moreover most patients are elderly and are averse to technology, and so the system has to be designed to be extremely simple to use. We describe our system, designed for simplicity of use and to support multiple types of device to monitor complex conditions. We describe how IEEE 11073 standards were used to integrate proprietary devices to our gateway to create a platform that is plug-and-play interoperable with our data server. We present preliminary results from our clinical study monitoring 68 CHF patients who were taking daily measurements of blood pressure and weight to investigate effects of behavioral change during Ramazan. There was a small decrease in mean diastolic and systolic blood pressure from pre-Ramazan to Ramazan that was significant (diastolic 131.8, 127.0, P=0.0005; systolic 71.4, 69.1. P=0.008), however there was no significant change from Ramazan to post-Ramazan (P=0.4). There was also a reduction in the number of incidents of systolic and diastolic blood pressure exceeding threshold values from pre-Ramazan to Ramazan.