Processing, storage and display of physiological measurements

In the UK, standards of monitoring required for the safe management of anaesthesia are set by the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. In the past physiological measurements of, for example, blood pressure, electrocardiograph (ECG), gas composition and airway pressures may have been performed by a collection of individual electronic machines. It is now common however to have an integrated monitoring system where signals from a variety of transducers are amplified, filtered, converted to digital form, processed by a computer and presented on a display to inform the user of both the condition of the patient and function of the anaesthesia system. It is important to have some understanding of the processes that take place between the production of the raw analogue electrical signal by a transducer and the information that is finally presented to the user.