Description

In medicine, Patient Monitor is the observation of a disease, condition or one or several medical parameters over time.

It can be performed by continuously measuring certain parameters by using a medical monitor (for example, by continuously measuring vital signs by a bedside monitor), and/or by repeatedly performing medical tests (such as blood glucose monitoring with a glucose meter in people with diabetes mellitus).

Transmitting data from a monitor to a distant monitoring station is known as telemetry or biotelemetry.

Monitoring of vital parameters can include several of the ones mentioned above, and most commonly include at least blood pressure and heart rate, and preferably also pulse oximetry and respiratory rate. Multimodal monitors that simultaneously measure and display the relevant vital parameters are commonly integrated into the bedside monitors in critical care units, and the anesthetic machines in operating rooms. These allow for continuous monitoring of a patient, with medical staff being continuously informed of the changes in general condition of a patient. Some monitors can even warn of pending fatal cardiacconditions before visible signs are noticeable to clinical staff, such as atrial fibrillation or premature ventricular contraction(PVC).

Physiological data are displayed continuously on a CRT, LED or LCD screen as data channels along the time axis, They may be accompanied by numerical readouts of computed parameters on the original data, such as maximum, minimum and average values, pulse and respiratory frequencies, and so on.

Besides the tracings of physiological parameters along time (X axis), digital medical displays have automated numeric readouts of the peak and/or average parameters displayed on the screen.

Modern medical display devices commonly use digital signal processing (DSP), which has the advantages of miniaturization, portability, and multi-parameter displays that can track many different vital signs at once.

Old analog patient displays, in contrast, were based on oscilloscopes, and had one channel only, usually reserved for electrocardiographic monitoring (ECG). Therefore, medical monitors tended to be highly specialized. One monitor would track a patient’s blood pressure, while another would measure pulse oximetry, another the ECG. Later analog models had a second or third channel displayed in the same screen, usually to monitor respiration movements and blood pressure. These machines were widely used and saved many lives, but they had several restrictions, including sensitivity to electrical interference, base level fluctuations and absence of numeric readouts and alarms.