A new system for continuous and remote monitoring of patients receiving home mechanical ventilation

Abstract

Home mechanical ventilation is the treatment of patients with respiratory failure or insufficiency by means of a mechanical ventilator at a patient's home. In order to allow remote patient monitoring, several tele-monitoring systems have been introduced in the last few years. However, most of them usually do not allow real-time services, as they have their own proprietary communication protocol implemented and some ventilation parameters are not always measured. Moreover, they monitor only some breaths during the whole day, despite the fact that a patient's respiratory state may change continuously during the day. In order to reduce the above drawbacks, this work reports the development of a novel remote monitoring system for long-term, home-based ventilation therapy; the proposed system allows for continuous monitoring of the main physical quantities involved during home-care ventilation (e.g., differential pressure, volume, and air flow rate) and is developed in order to allow observations of different remote therapy units located in different places of a city, region, or country. The developed remote patient monitoring system is able to detect various clinical events (e.g., events of tube disconnection and sleep apnea events) and has been successfully tested by means of experimental tests carried out with pulmonary ventilators typically used to support sick patients.

A Novel Magnetic Respiratory Sensor for Human Healthcare

“…When one gets older, they breathe weaker, and their number of breaths per minute (the respiratory rate) increases. This finding is consistent with those reported in previous works [21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. It is also worth noting in Figure 2a-c that the breath amplitude, which is proportional to the change in impedance due to breathing (defined as ∆Z = Z h − Z l ), of subject 2 is significantly lower than those of the other two (subjects 1 and 3).…”

“…Research has shown that respiratory rate varies considerably with age [21][22][23][24][25][26][27]. For instance, an infant (1-12 moths) breathes between 30 and 60 times per minute, toddlers (1-2 years) breathe anywhere from 24 to 40 times per minute, and preschoolers (3-5 years) breathe between 22 and 34 times per minute.…”

Network Data Acquisition and Monitoring System for Intensive Care Mechanical Ventilation Treatment

“…The lack of real-time monitoring and data processing remains a limitation for bedside application. Battista developed a remote system to monitor home-based ventilation therapy, enabling close monitoring of therapy in remote locations [41]. This system can simultaneously observe different remote therapy units and users were able to detect multiple clinical events.…”

Chronic respiratory failure in bronchopulmonary dysplasia

“…Unfortunately, many cases were due to a preventable complication rather than the progression of underlying disease, and highest in low‐income areas 44,89,91 . Safety may be improved by use of in‐home telemedicine and, potentially, remote monitoring 92‐94 …”