Respiratory consultant: a hand-held computer-based system for oxygen therapy and critical care medicine.

The assessment of respiratory system performance may involve issues such as pulmonary gas exchange, respiratory mechanics, oxygen transport and other factors. This paper describes an MS-DOS program called Respiratory Consultant that was designed for use with a hand-held MS-DOS computer, but can also run under Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 if desired. Respiratory Consultant performs a number of computational tasks potentially appropriate to respiratory care in the ICU and elsewhere. These include: predicted arterial oxygen tension from age, interconversion of oxygen tension and saturation, calculation of gas exchange indices and oxygen transport parameters, dead-space estimation, and pulmonary function test interpretation. Respiratory Consultant is freeware that will run easily on most IBM-compatible PCs and may be downloaded from the Internet.