Portable platform independent patient monitoring

Medical applications are becoming increasingly available on portable devices such as smart phones, tablets and small notebooks in healthcare organizations. However, application development for diagnostic and monitoring purposes on these devices is still limited, because of regulatory requirements and significant development time and complexity for the multiple mobile platforms in use. Our objective was to create a cross-platform patient monitor solution, with the main focus on tablets and test the feasibility of this platform for patient monitoring. We have developed an HTML5-based portable patient monitoring application to be a cross-platform based solution for a broad range of tablets. The application shows the vital signs, curves and trend parameters as a monitor would display. The usability of the portable patient monitoring application has been evaluated on the iPad 3, Samsung Tab 2 10.1 and the Windows 8 platform. We tested the main browser on each platform and also the latest version of additional popular (mobile) browsers. In conclusion, platform independent patient monitoring is possible by using standard tablet operating systems and the HTML5 standard without requiring appdevelopment.