Review of Vital Signs Monitoring Systems – Patient’s Acceptability, Issues and Challenges

Vital signs are often considered as critical information to assess initial health condition and underlying health issues. Vital signs can contribute towards early detection, early diagnosis and risk reduction of fatal incidents. Today’s advanced monitoring systems incorporate the balanced combination of clinical and technological aspects to give an innovative healthcare outcome. Vital signs monitoring systems are rapidly becoming the core of today’s healthcare deliveries. The paradigm shifted from traditional and manual recording to computer based electronic records and further to smartphones as versatile and innovative healthcare monitoring systems. In this paper, the vital signs monitoring systems are classified as wearable, wireless and mobile monitoring systems and patient acceptability of some of these systems has been evaluated using 30 participants. Moreover, a comprehensive review of related literature in the context of acceptability, mobility, reliability and efficiency of vital signs monitoring systems in healthcare delivery and handling physiological measurements is presented. The outcome of this study indicates that despite some limitations commented by patients and clinicians, these systems should be more compact and simple to operate and they should be available to healthcare professionals with minimum interruption to normal daily life activities (ADLs).