Telemedicine: Patient Monitoring in Unusual Environments

Abstract

Of the several advantages telemetry systems have to offer the burgeoning field of patient monitoring, we have previously stressed recording from freely moving patients unencumbered by lengthy cables and unattached to conventional bulky machines. Paramount in the applications of systems designed and fabricated in our laboratory of Environmental Neurobiology have been the monitoring of patients afflicted with temporal lobe epilepsy in which the capture of unilateral or bilateral EEG seizure activity dictates the possibility or futility of neurosurgical intervention (1). Together with sophisticated computer analyses of neurophysiological data, telemetry has also made it possible to identify EEG correlates of bizarre schizophrenic ritualistic behavior virtually impossible to capture by conventional hard-wire techniques (2). This presentation emphasizes another aspect of the utility of telemetry: the opportunity to record from patients in meaningful circumstances outside the sterile environs of the Neurophysiology Laboratory which sometimes involves freedom of movement and sometimes quiescence. The critical element in these situations is the unacceptability of bulky machinery and its attendant problems. Two such environments are the operating room and the sleep research and treatment laboratory or bedroom. Our current fairly extensive telemetry studies involve both of these surrounds. These activities will now be discussed.