Covid-19 Real-time ICU Patient Monitoring System

The health professionals spend their entire day handling the infected patients continuously making them highly exposed to the virus. But, this does not stop them from doing their duty because they do it for the greater good of the entire country. Sri Lanka is not a rich country. We do not have the luxury of spending billions on issues like this.

While I was visiting the hospitals during the lock-down to distribute the Face Shields with my Faculty supporting me, Peradeniya Teaching Hospital came to me with a problem.

How they monitor the patients in ICU's is by visiting them and reading the vital data on the vital monitor several times per day. Each visit, they will be wearing full PPE kits, and exposed to the virus. Not only that, with the shortage of PPE's it was hard to manage these visits. So they wanted to know if its possible to monitor these patients vital signs remotely.

This was a new challenge for me ! But I love challenges. So I learned a bit more about these vital monitors and the protocols they use to communicate. However there's little to none information about this area since the medical equipment industry mostly maintains a monopoly when it comes to this type of applications. As the first step I took a vital monitor to my home to study about its behavior, firmware, communication protocols etc.

As this was an urgent requirement, I felt its best to use some support in building the system. So I got together with Kasun Vithanage ( Final Year Undergraduate - Computer Engineering Department - UOP ) to speed up the process and use his expertise as well to make this challenge a success.

Working 24 hrs with our fullest effort, we were able to successfully handle this challenge within 3 DAYS !

I had to visit the Peradeniya Teaching Hospital's ICU with PPE kits and instruct the IT Staff of the Hospital to layout the network plan, basic routing setup and basic wiring required for the monitors to be linked to the server, and with the frontend devices for the medical staff to monitor the patients. Following this successful implementation, I was requested by the Kandy General Hospital to implement the system at their COVID ICU Ward as they were already handling COVID positive patients.

This was a new yet interesting and worthy challenge for me and I am so glad that I was able to contribute the knowledge that was given to me by our beloved hardworking lecturers at the Computer Engineering Department towards a worthy cause and I hope our effort made some positive impact on handling the COVID-19 situation.

For more details about the technical side feel free to read the fantastic article written by my colleague Kasun Vithanage.

https://kasvith.me/posts/how-we-created-a-realtime-patient-monitoring-system-with-go-and-vue/