A Flexible Vital Sign Representation Framework for Mobile Healthcare

This paper proposes a framework for patient´s vital sign representations. This framework offers the flexibility to extend or to augment represented vital signs, e.g. with trend signs or professional´s annotations. It further enables multi standard representations of vital signs and meta-level information for processing of represented vital signs. Vital signs represented in accordance with this framework are therefore suitable for forwarding, processing and rendering within a heterogeneous mobile environment which applies different formatting standards or use a diversity of wireless communication technologies of different quality. We analyze the needs of three mobile healthcare stakeholders to capture the requirements of vital sign representations and manipulations that have to be accommodated by the framework. The derived stakeholders´ requirements are closely examined during the XML-based development of the framework. Several scenarios are presented to illustrate the benefits of the framework.