Telemonitoring in medicine
Telemonitoring is an essential component of telemedicine and basically involves the observation of patients outside medical institutions. Telemonitoring is becoming a new part in concepts of integrated medical care, disease management programmes and in hospital aftercare.
Health costs are incurred to a considerable degree through the treatment of acute medical situations.
Telemedical systems in medicine enable acute situations to be avoided by the early detection of deterioration in health. As soon as individually specified limits have been crossed, an alarm is triggered. The direct telephone support of relatives is also possible, since the doctor in charge has the overall situation of the patient in front of him. This can prevent deaths, and reduces the need for hospitalisation.
Aipermon's telemedical systems represent the latest technological developments.
Innovative developments of various technologies are integrated into the systems:
- Aipermon uses the most modern brand-name devices to record vital parameters such as blood pressure, weight or heart frequency and develops the AiperMotion accelerometer
- Aipermon uses wireless, secure and highly reliable technologies to transfer values from the patient to the medical centre supervising him
- Aipermon integrates highly intelligent and complex communication possibilities into the system, in order to provide efficient communication between doctor and patient, patient and doctor.
In the project "Partnership for the Heart"
project the telemedical equipment is provided by Aipermon. The Berlin Charité and the Robert-Bosch-Hospital Stuttgart are in charge of the large study project on the subject of cardiac insufficiency. Clinical trials will be performed from summer 2007 over a period of 12 months in the regions Berlin-Brandenburg and Stuttgart on 400 patients with chronic cardiac insufficiency. These aim to demonstrate how heavily the mortality rate and the rehospitalisation of cardiac insufficiency patients can be reduced by telemedical care.
Further project partners are Inter Component Ware AG (ICW) with its electronic "LifeSensor" health record and Robert Bosch ltd., which develops the general technical concept, integrates the systems, and operates the telemedical centres in Berlin and Stuttgart. The health insurance company Barmer Ersatzkasse and Robert-Bosch Health Insurance have a partnership status.
In the study, scales, blood pressure meters, ECG and AiperMotion activity sensor are used. Without exception, only brand-name devices are equipped with Aipermon technology. The central communication device is the Mobile Medical Assistant (MMA), developed by Aipermon. In this way patients can simply perform measurements themselves at home. The technology then takes care of the transmission of data to the Telemedicine Service-Center in the background.
Hospital after-care
After operations and hospital stays due to accidents, being sent home involves a certain risk with specific clinical pictures, as well as a strong reduction in terms of the amount of therapy and inspection.
The use of telemonitoring systems can minimise these risks, for example by daily measuring vital data, enabling the stabilisation of the condition of health to be continually observed. If there is deterioration in health, this will be noticed at an early stage through the continuous data transfer.
Areas of application can be found for the following diagnoses clinical pictures:
- Cardiovascular diseases (such as heart insufficiency, hypertonia...): monitoring of weight and blood pressure
- Metabolic disturbances (such as diabetes mellitus): Monitoring of blood sugar and physical activity
- Post-operative (e.g. after operations involving the locomotor system): monitoring of physical activity and blood pressure
- Healing wounds (e.g. scar formation, bedsores…): Image transfer for medical assessment
- Pre- and post-natal (e.g. at-risk pregnancies, multiple births…): monitoring of blood pressure and weight
- With the AiperCoach Home System and the AiperMotion activity sensor, Aipermon provides the right components for hospital after-care.
© Aipermon 2007