Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
take the two examples of patients who need to be discharged from the hos-
pital early and need to be monitored for irregularities, and the chronically
ill patients who would use such technologies to monitor their vital signs so
that the professionals can get a more clear picture of their health dynamics
to make better diagnosis decisions and to make more adequate decisions for
the management of treatment trajectory.
The first category of patients, generally, will have to develop new skills to
cope with the technology that they wear and operate. For instance, patients
would be required to learn new skills for measuring their blood glucose,
or hearing the heart sounds of their unborn baby, or, for epilepsy patients,
knowing what they have to do when they receive an alarm before having an
attack. These situations require the user of the technologies to accept new
responsibilities. One example of such responsibility is that the user should
be in a position where data can be transferred via wireless signals. The user
should also make sure that the mobile gateway unit, which might be their
mobile phone, functions well and transfers the data timely, and finally they
have to be able to understand what they have to do if something goes wrong.
The role of informing the user on these responsibilities is often on the shoul-
der of the medical professionals. However, in our interviews, medical pro-
fessionals suggest that this can be a very time-consuming task in the case
of patients who need to use the technology for a limited period after certain
medical interventions. In contrast, chronically ill patients are most often well
informed about their illnesses and can cope with using assistive technol-
ogies in an easier manner because they will be using these technologies for
the longer run. Still, consultation with medical professionals about different
possible technological solutions and what might fit the individual situation
better is an important issue to be considered if efficient solutions are to be
delivered.
The issue of trust and dependency of the user to the application is also an
element to be considered. One of our interviewees who was involved in the
evaluation of a pilot project on BAN for monitoring cardiovascular patients,
mentioned that after the pilot study, some of the patients with heart disor-
ders who were given mobile monitoring devices were not willing to take
distance from the equipment at the end of the pilot trajectory because it gave
them a certain feeling of confidence, safety, and security.
At the moment, there are also different endeavors to develop and provide
technologies (that enable monitoring of vital signs on a remote location) also
outside the setting of health-care supervision that include lifestyle man-
agement services. The health-care professionals interviewed in this study
have shown concerns about how services in this setting are defined. They
argued that provision of medical services should not have profitability as its
basic goals but rather provision of a high-quality service, which is based on
adequate indication and analysis of facts and professional medical insight.
Thus, if such services are delivered through private companies, then com-
mercial interests will become important, which might undermine the focus
