Abstract: A patient monitoring system for use in a telemedicine system that allows multiple medical devices to communicate with a control unit via an interface that uses a single interrupt. In architecture, the system can be implemented in hardware, or a combination of hardware and software, and is more particularly implemented as follows: A plurality of medical devices are connected to a control unit via a device interface that uses a single interrupt in the transmission of data from the medical devices to the control unit. When a medical device has data to transmit to the control unit, the medical device transmits data to the device interface, and the device interface uses its single interrupt line in the transmission of data to the control unit.

Abstract: The present invention provides a packet-based telemedicine system for communicating video, voice and medical data between a central monitoring station and a patient monitoring station which is remotely-located with respect to the central monitoring station. The patient monitoring station obtains digital video, voice and medical measurement data from a patient and encapsulates the data in packets and sends the packets over a network to the central monitoring station. Since the information is encapsulated in packets, the information can be sent over multiple types or combinations of network architectures, including a Community access Television (CATV) network, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), the Internet, a local area network (LAN), a wide are network (WAN), over a wireless communications network, or over an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network. Thus, a separate transmission protocol is not required for each different type of transmission media.