Model-Based Integrated Monitoring for the Intensive Care Unit

Several themes are incorporated into a current collaboration to integrate data from patient monitoring devices in the hospital intensive care unit (ICU). ICU patients are typically monitored by multiple instruments that operate independently without communicating with each other. Each of these instruments generates an alarm when the variable it monitors falls outside the pre-set range, without regard to whether such an alarm is warranted on the basis of a more comprehensive picture of patient status and treatment. We are developing physiologically-based computer models of the patient that will receive data from various instruments and from nursing notes, attenuate the noise and artifacts in the data, then use the processed data to estimate patient status in an integrated way and use higher-level reasoning modules to generate appropriate alarms and clinical hypotheses.