Telemedicine enabled remote critical care ventilator.

Following a critical illness, technology-dependent children on chronic ventilator support require specialized care to facilitate recovery and rehabilitation that minimally impedes social and psychological development. Intervention strategies have been confounded by the need for frequent assessment via physical exam in a relatively immobile patient population. The availability of technology that enables effective, timely, and reliable information transfer between the homecare providers and the attending pulmonologist is likely to decrease the need for transport and hospitalization, and provide a dramatically increased level of comfort for care givers in the home and ultimately the children. A Pulmonetic Systems LTV 1200 ventilator was enabled with a wireless cellular interface to make its settings and performance data real-time accessible over a secure wireless Internet connection. A complete web-browser ventilator interface program was specified, coded, and tested. The live web interface was used to support a formal survey of pediatric pulmonologists to help gauge the potential medical utility of the new remote interface to the ventilator. The survey results were overwhelmingly supportive of the concept, and the pulmonologists listed many varied ways that the data could have utility in their patient populations.