SIMON - A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE FOR INTELLIGENT PATIENT MONITORING

Intelligent real-time patient monitoring encompasses data acquisition and reduction, sensor validation, diagnosis, therapy advice, and selec tive display of information. This paper describes the architecture and the functionality of a prototype intelligent patient monitoring syste m, named SIMON, designed to meet these requirements. In SIMON, the var ious aspects of a monitoring task are performed by three semi-independ ent modules running asynchronously: the feature extraction, the patien t model, and the display modules. Central to SIMON is the notion of co ntext sensitivity which permits (a) the adaptation of the monitoring s trategy in response to changes either in the patient state or in the m onitoring equipment and (b) the contextual interpretation of incoming data. SIMON is currently applied to the task of monitoring newborn inf ants with respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and undergoing assisted ventilation.