Patent: Systems, Methods, and Devices for Remote Health Monitoring and Management
Inventors: Maneesha Vinodini Ramesh, Rahul Krishnan Pathinarupothi, Ekanath Srihari Rangan
Amrita Center for Wireless Networks & Applications (AmritaWNA) received a US patent for its innovative system for remote patient monitoring using a combination of wearable sensor devices and mobile phones. This affordable innovation is expected to be a gamechanger in providing remote healthcare monitoring facilities in rural areas of India. The researchers at AmritaWNA have been working on developing affordable solutions for rural healthcare for more than a decade in collaboration with the doctors at Amrita’s super-specialty AIMS hospital in Kochi.
Their current invention includes using body wearable devices that can measure heart rate, blood oxygen (SpO2), ECG, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and activity data. This data can be sent to a mobile phone, wherein software computes the severity of a patient for the first level of diagnosis. A smart algorithm analyses the urgency for sending this patient data. Based on this, the data is securely sent to the nearest primary health center, a far away tertiary hospital, or to a remotely located doctor over existing mobile networks. The doctors/nurses would use this data to decide timely clinical interventions that need to be done, thereby providing patients in rural areas with high-quality healthcare services.
However, without a mobile phone-based early severity detection system, such remote patient monitoring systems may fail in timely detection and alerts. Additionally, many of the existing remote patient monitoring systems could not be used in rural and remote areas due to the lack of sufficient bandwidth. The researchers came up with a breakthrough solution to overcome both these challenges and enable early severity computation and medical data transfer over bandwidth miserly networks (such as 2G/3G), using a technique called RASPRO (Rapid Active Summarization for effective PROgnosis). RASPRO software includes Physician Assist Filters that progressively extract patient severity from raw sensor data into more meaningful motifs and timely alerts.
RASPRO Physician Assist Filters convert body parameter values such as ECG, BP, etc., into clinically meaningful severity summaries called motifs and helps in producing timely alerts.
RASPRO software figures out what is the most clinically relevant data from various sensing devices and then sends only the most required data in the form of “motifs” to the remote doctors while making sure other data is archived over time. This results in a great reduction in data and power usage which is critically important for the success of remote health monitoring in remote places.
RASPRO also integrates smart machine learning algorithms for early detection of diseases and has proven to be successful in the detection of fatal disease conditions such as Acute Hypotensive Episodes more than 1.5 hours ahead of time.
This remote patient monitoring system is also closely integrated with Amrita’s Hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems so that patient data is securely stored and is available at the click of a button to doctors in hospitals.
