Improving patient care by unshackling telemedicine: adaptively aggregating wireless networks to facilitate continuous collaboration.

Telemedicine has had a positive impact on some aspects of patient care. However, existing telemedicine systems that use high-quality video are inflexible, requiring investment in fixed infrastructure. We have overcome a number of technical challenges to build a mobile telemedicine system that can reliably deliver high-quality video from both stationary sites and moving vehicles.

Is redundancy in vital signs monitoring useful?

During an ongoing study of wireless vital signs monitoring of post-triage patients with SMART [1] in the waiting area of the emergency department (ED) at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, we observed that redundancy in vital signs monitoring can be advantageous.

SMART--an integrated wireless system for monitoring unattended patients.

Monitoring vital signs and locations of certain classes of ambulatory patients can be useful in overcrowded emergency departments and at disaster scenes, both on-site and during transportation. To be useful, such monitoring needs to be portable and low cost, and have minimal adverse impact on emergency personnel, e.g.