Empirical Study of Medical IOT for Patients with Intractable Diseases at Home

摘要

Telemedicine for chronic disease management is extending to the home through the use of medical devices and ICT technologies. Patients with intractable diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and lethal neurodegenerative diseases, have been returning to their homes rather than remaining hospitalized. Reliable alarms for condition changes of patients and burden reduction of their families are taking root as foundations of telemedicine for patients with intractable diseases. This paper discusses reliable alarm delivery and expected medical IoT features for those patients. A patient's family has difficulty in setting optimal parameters of life-support medical devices following patient condition changes. Also, caregivers and patients' families expect reliable alarms and false alarm reduction from tele-alarm systems used at home. We need to provide both anxiety relief for patients' families and patient safety by reliably monitoring the patients. We designed and implemented an alarm delivery system for patients with intractable diseases, and here we propose a prototype false-alarm reduction mechanism for highly-controlled medical device systems including an artificial ventilator. We investigated alarms of a patient for one year, cooperating with the patient's family. We need both hardware standard interfaces and consistent alarm functions between artificial ventilators. We conclude with our further work for patients with different types of intractable diseases and for standardization of medical IoT networks integrating false-alarm reduction systems.