General-purpose medical instrumentation

Abstract

A general-purpose, low-cost system provides comprehensive physiological data collection, with extensive data object oriented programmability and configurability for a variety of medical as well as other analog data collection applications. A general-purpose data routing and encapsulation architecture supports input tagging and standardized routing through modern packet switch networks, including the Internet; from one of multiple points of origin or patients, to one or multiple points of data analysis for physician review. The preferred architecture further supports multiple-site data buffering for redundancy and reliability, and real-time data collection, routing, and viewing (or slower than real-time processes when communications infrastructure is slower than the data collection rate). Routing and viewing stations allow for the insertion of automated analysis routines to aid in data encoding, analysis, viewing, and diagnosis.

We claim: 
     
         1 . A system for communicating medical information, comprising:
 a plurality of portable, wearable patient monitors, each including one or more sensors, each sensor being operative to collect physiologic data at a data collection rate and at a data collection time;   each patient monitor further including a processor operative to tag the collected data with time and source identifiers so that the data are self-descriptive, packetize the tagged data by segmenting the data into discrete packets, and feed the packetized data to a hierarchical communications network;   one or more data-viewing nodes interfaced to the communications network, each data-viewing node enabling a user to access and view the physiologic data;   the network including a plurality of data-collection nodes with databases to collect the physiologic data from the patient monitors and distribute the distribute the data to the viewing nodes; and   a synchronization subsystem ensuring that the time order of the data is known at each point in the collection, databasing, and viewing functions.   
     
     
         2 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein at least a portion of the communications network is wireless. 
     
     
         3 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the communications network includes the Internet. 
     
     
         4 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein:
 the processor is further operative to encrypt the data prior to feeding it to the network; and   each data-viewing node is operative to decrypt the data prior to viewing.   
     
     
         5 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein at least a portion of the data is cardiac-related. 
     
     
         6 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the data includes electrocardiogram information. 
     
     
         7 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the synchronization subsystem includes mutual synchronization. 
     
     
         8 . The system of  claim 1 , wherein the synchronization subsystem is GPS-based.