Continuous real-time remote monitoring of severely or chronically ill children

Abstract

Compared to parents of healthy children, parents of severely or chronically ill children have significantly worse physical and mental health and a lower quality of life, e.g. because of lack of sleep. The proposed solution aims at assisting caregivers by means of a remote monitoring service run by professional nursing staff which should allow parents to get a good night’s sleep. A smart algorithm has been developed to detect if a particular parameter (heart rate, respiration rate or oxygen saturation) has exceeded a pre-defined threshold and thus may imply an emergency. Parents are only alerted after a professional nurse in the monitoring centre has cross-checked vital parameter trends and carried out an audio-visual inspection. The quality and accuracy of the system has been validated through iterative testing including a test performed in a children’s hospital to ensure that the monitoring system is not inferior to a hospital set-up.