Head of bed elevation recorder for Intensive Care Unit

This paper presents a recording system optimized for long term measurement of the head of bed elevation in the Intensive Care Unit.
The continuous monitoring of this parameter allows to find the correlation between the patient's position and the risk of the Ventilation Associated Pneumonia (VAP), which is a very serious problem in therapy of critically ill patients.
The described device may be an important tool to evaluate and improve the "care bundles" - sets of procedures recommended for treatment of patients in the ICU.
The measurement of the elevation is performed with an electronic accelerometer.
Two versions of the system are described. The first one - dedicated for setups containing a PC compatible computer with possibility to connect additional hardware, and the second one - where no PC is available and system must operate autonomously, storing the data in a memory card.