A medical monitor or physiological monitor is a medical device used for monitoring. It can consist of one or more sensors, processing components, display devices (which are sometimes in themselves called "monitors"), as well as communication links for displaying or recording the results elsewhere through a monitoring network.

Components

Sensor

Sensors of medical monitors include biosensors and mechanical sensors.

Translating component

The translating component of medical monitors is responsible for converting the signals from the sensors to a format that can be shown on the display device or transferred to an external display or recording device.

Display device

Physiological data are displayed continuously on a CRT, LED or LCD screen as data channels along the time axis, They may be accompanied by numerical readouts of computed parameters on the original data, such as maximum, minimum and average values, pulse and respiratory frequencies, and so on.

Besides the tracings of physiological parameters along time (X axis), digital medical displays have automated numeric readouts of the peak and/or average parameters displayed on the screen.

Modern medical display devices commonly use digital signal processing (DSP), which has the advantages of miniaturization, portability, and multi-parameter displays that can track many different vital signs at once.

Old analog patient displays, in contrast, were based on oscilloscopes, and had one channel only, usually reserved for electrocardiographic monitoring (ECG). Therefore, medical monitors tended to be highly specialized. One monitor would track a patient's blood pressure, while another would measure pulse oximetry, another the ECG. Later analog models had a second or third channel displayed in the same screen, usually to monitor respiration movements and blood pressure. These machines were widely used and saved many lives, but they had several restrictions, including sensitivity to electrical interference, base level fluctuations and absence of numeric readouts and alarms.

Communication links

Several models of multi-parameter monitors are networkable, i.e., they can send their output to a central ICU monitoring station, where a single staff member can observe and respond to several bedside monitors simultaneously. Ambulatory telemetry can also be achieved by portable, battery-operated models which are carried by the patient and which transmit their data via a wireless data connection.

Digital monitoring has created the possibility, which is being fully developed, of integrating the physiological data from the patient monitoring networks into the emerging hospital electronic health record and digital charting systems, using appropriate health care standards which have been developed for this purpose by organizations such as IEEE and HL7. This newer method of charting patient data reduces the likelihood of human documentation error and will eventually reduce overall paper consumption. In addition, automated ECG interpretation incorporates diagnostic codes automatically into the charts. Medical monitor's embedded software can take care of the data coding according to these standards and send messages to the medical records application, which decodes them and incorporates the data into the adequate fields.

Long-distance connectivity can avail for telemedicine, which involves provision of clinical health care at a distance.

Other components

A medical monitor can also have the function to produce an alarm (such as using audible signals) to alert the staff when certain criteria are set, such as when some parameter exceeds of falls the level limits.

Mobile appliances

An entirely new scope is opened with mobile carried monitors, even such in sub-skin carriage. This class of monitors delivers information gathered in body-area networking (BAN) to e.g. smart phones and implemented autonomous agents.