Remote patient monitoring and information system.

This paper presents a remote healthcare patient monitoring system, called the Virtual Eye (VI), that utilises the World Wide Web infrastructure to monitor, collect, analyse and record patients' health status. The data is stored in the hospital database and can be accessed from anywhere through the internet. When a patient is in an alarming situation, the VI sends SMS messages to the mobile of the designated health personnel via the public GSM network. The novelty of the system lies in its security and its ability to use both the internet and the GSM network as communication media. Doctors can access the database server to compare the patient's current status with his/her medical history. It can be used by one physician to monitor a group of patients simultaneously, or by a group of physicians who all monitor the same patient. It allows plug-and-play of multivendor off-the-shelf hardware devices, thus avoiding proprietary standards.