FYVE

Overview

Lattice designed and developed the FYVE patient monitoring system to enables tele-health services in remote critical care settings — for patients who require constant monitoring and clinical oversight, but do not have ready access to specialists.

Perceived need and concept

In 2014, while there were several devices that measured a patient’s vital signs, none that we knew of provided cost-effective, seamless data transmission from the patient bedside to an off-site central monitoring workstation. At most, patient monitors sent data to a central workstation within the same facility — over ethernet cables.

Hence, we decided to develop a system that transmits data to the cloud directly, and can be accessed from a remote workstation anywhere. Our goal — enable a specialist in a major urban center to access data of patients in rural areas. Our experiences in rural and peri-urban care delivery supported this hypothesis.

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System design

The system consisted of a base station, a tablet app, and a web console.

All five vitals parameters and graphs — SPO2, NIBP, 5-lead ECG, Temperature and Respiratory Rate — were transmitted from the base station to a cloud server. From the server, data could be access remotely over 3G/ WiFi, and seen on the web console. Remote data access has a latency of < 9 seconds.

Simultaneously, vitals were displayed on an Android tablet paired to the monitor via Bluetooth. This synchronously transmission of data over Bluetooth and WiFi made the system fault-tolerant.

Separating the display (Android tablet) from the base station also provided operational flexibility to users. One of the usage scenarios was in ambulances, where the display was mounted closed to the paramedic for ease-of-use.

A derivative of this product, the FYVE-GS, is a GSM-based patient montior that communicates via text messages (SMS). This system was custom-built to cater to a pilot project implemented by the State Goverment of Andhra Pradesh. In March 2016, 25 such units were deployed in 25 primary health centers spanning 13 districts of Andhra Pradesh. Lattice's team traveled to each site to install, commission and provide user training.