There has been a significant development in bio-medical instrumentation over the last two decades. A number of high-tech medical diagnostic and therapeutic systems are used by doctors for diagnostics, for monitoring critical patients, and for delivering treatment. Such devices detect abnormal physiological states, and they trigger audio-visual alarms when the limits are crossed. However, they require frequent intervention by doctors to manage these alarms.

If such patient monitoring systems could be equipped with some intelligence and self-managing capabilities, the systems would be able to autonomically handle several alarm conditions for efficient operation, would require less intervention by doctors and would reduce errors related to patient management.

In this paper we describe a self-managed generic framework for digital health monitoring that can be applied in different use cases. The self-managing capabilities of such a framework are useful to efficiently manage several tasks that usually require user intervention.

We believe that such a system design will enable medical device manufacturers to design their biomedical front-end devices to be compatible with a generic framework and this will drive standardization of hardware and software interfaces for medical devices.

Moreover, this framework utilizes the advances in Personal Computer (PC) and server technology to provide reliable, generic, cost-effective and efficiently self-managed patient monitoring solutions.

Figure 1: A conventional multi-parameter patient monitor
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