A wireless patient monitoring system for hospitalized older adults: Acceptability, reliability and accuracy evaluation

Wireless patient monitoring systems are becoming increasing acceptable in today´s healthcare market, because of their low cost and easy adoption/integration features. However, there is little research on assessing the clinical acceptability, accuracy and reliability of such systems. This paper aims to address some of the current issues and challenges facing wireless monitoring systems by adopting a robust three-way cross validation data collection approach. Our main focus is to evaluate the developed system in terms of user acceptability, reliability and accuracy. We evaluated the system using a set of collected vital signs (blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, pulse rate, temperature and blood glucose level) from 30 hospitalized older adults. The system achieved an overall accuracy of 98% when compared with the manually recorded data as well as hospitals´ ward data record. Moreover, the system response time was fast as it recorded an overall transmission delay of 1.16 seconds on average.