Wavelets for ICU monitoring

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bedside monitors present the medical staff with large amounts of continuous data which can create a number of challenges. If the data is transmitted as part of a telemedicine system then the large volume of data can put pressure on bandwidth and affect the quality of service of the network. Another challenge is that the large volume of data has to be interpreted by medical staff to make a patient state assessment. In this paper we propose a time series analysis technique called data wavelets to derive trends in the data-this acts as a form of data compression for telemedicine and improves the quality of service of a network and also facilitates clinical decision support in the form of qualitative reasoning for patient state assessment. Our approach has been successfully applied to cardiovascular data from a neonatal ICU.