Data compression for ICU telemedicine to reduce transmission costs and allow qualitative reasoning

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) telemedicine can be considered as the transmission of large volumes of continuous and noisy physiological data generated by the ICU monitors attached to patients from one site to another using computer and telecommunication technology for purpose of remote assistance. A common form of telecommunication is broadband which presents 2 major challenges in rural areas: bandwidth demand can easily outstrip the revenue realizable that is needed to pay for the network infrastructure investment so lower (cheaper and slower) bandwidth is normal; a consequence of restricted bandwidth on access pipes is service contention at the customer site, even if core bandwidth exists to deliver the services. In this paper we propose data wavelets as a data compression technique to transform the ICU monitor data into trends to address the challenges of broadband in rural areas for data transmission and allow qualitative reasoning at the receiving site for clinical decision support.