My daughter has some health issues that requires her to be hooked up to a pulse oximeter at night that monitors her oxygen level and heart rate. We have night nurses so we can sleep, but sometimes we wake up at night and want to "check her numbers" without going into her bedroom and possibly waking her up (our daughter is usually a very light sleeper). The pulseox does have (very loud) alarms that go off according to limits we set, but there are subtle trends that we may watch for according to what type of day she had. Again, the standard way to check these in the middle of the night would be to walk into her room, look at the current numbers and listen to how she is breathing, and then ask the nurse about any "non-alarm" trends she may have noticed. I knew there had to be a better way to do this.
The simplest approach seemed to just put a baby monitor with video in front of the pulseox device and then we could bring up the camera on our phone to see the numbers. Besides the cost and quality issues of most nightime baby monitors, there did not seem to be a location in the room to put the baby monitor that would not either block the nurse's view of the numbers or be too far away from our daughter for the audio to pick up well. We also already own an audio baby monitor that works very well, so it seems a waste to buy another one just to add the remote video to see the current numbers and not even tell us average/trend information.
The device that the home health company provides us is a Masimo RAD-8. It has a serial/RS232 port on the back of it. I was happy to find that the data coming off the port is not protected, so getting the data from the pulseox device to a remote display seemed possible (similar to how they do it at a hospital's nurse station). I chose to use a Raspberry Pi to capture the data, process it, and present it on a web server where we could then load a web page with our phone. The main reasons for choosing this device were low cost, small size, and it has an established community in case I ran into any problems.
