Hospital and home care equipment is the set of devices that watch over and treat a patient on the ward, in the intensive care unit (ICU) and at home. It includes the monitors, pumps, sterilizers and therapy machines that keep a patient safe after an operation or through a long illness.
The device that a visitor notices first is the patient monitor, the screen over the bed. It shows the heartbeat, the blood pressure and the oxygen in the blood. It raises an alarm when a reading crosses a limit that the nurse has set. Its readings are a time series, a list of values, each with the time at which it was measured. A related device, the Holter monitor, records the heart for a day or more while the patient moves about. If the heart's rhythm fails, a defibrillator gives an electric shock to restore it.
Medicine reaches the patient through other devices. An infusion pump feeds a drug into a vein at a set rate, and checks the dose against a built-in list of safe limits. Drug delivery devices are the vials, syringes and auto-injectors that hold an injectable medicine. Many of them are made for biologics, medicines made from living cells.
Some devices prevent harm in other ways. Medical sterilizers clean the surgical instruments between operations, and record proof of each cycle. Negative pressure wound therapy applies gentle suction to help a hard-to-heal wound close.
Specialist departments have their own machines. Ophthalmic surgical equipment removes a cloudy lens from the eye and places an artificial one. Newborn screening devices test a baby's hearing and eyes in the first days of life. Rehabilitation robotics help a patient walk again, or use an arm again, after a stroke.
More and more of this equipment goes home with the patient. A CPAP machine keeps a sleeping person's airway open. Each morning, it sends the night's record to the maker's cloud, where the doctor can read it. Watching a patient at home through connected devices in this way is called remote patient monitoring. In hospitals, the readings from many bedside devices are collected in one system by ICU device integration software.