A New Telesupervision System Integrated in an Intelligent Networked Operating Room

In this article, a telesupervision system for the anesthesiologist is presented. It makes use of a manufacturer independent standard for a networked operating room, which is currently under development in a research project called smartOR. The telesupervision system itself is part of the smartOR network and consists of a workstation at the anesthesiologist’s workplace and a remote tablet PC, a supervisor can use. Besides a short description of the smartOR network, this work shows the technical principles of the anesthesiology workstation and telesupervision system called SomnuCare. Furthermore, some exemplary opportunities a networked operating room can offer are presented, based on a data acquisition during surgery in the University Hospital Aachen. Keywords-telesupervision; anesthesiology; smart operating room; network