Current State of Critical Patient Monitoring and Outstanding Challenges

Abstract

Technological advances in the fields of electronics and computer science have given rise to a considerable increase in the number of physiological parameters available to clinical staff for interpreting a patient’s state. However, owing to the limitations and flaws in current commercial monitoring devices, this has not resulted in a corresponding increase in healthcare quality. This chapter analyses the reasons why clinical staff are not making full use of information from the monitoring devices currently in use in critical care units; a review is made of the most salient proposals from the scientific literature in order to address the imbalance existing between the amount of data available and the improvement in healthcare; and those problems for which suitable solutions have yet to be found and which have, up until now, hindered the applications of said proposals to clinical routine are analysed.