The treatment of many cancer patients involves repeated courses of chemotherapy.  For most of this the patient is "well" but during each course it is very likely that the patient will become very "unwell" and will require treatment within 6 hours.  A facility allowing the "well" time of patients to be spent outside of hospital would have many benefits. 
The environment within a hospital poses many dangers for patients undergoing chemotherapy, with the prevalence of many virulent and infectious diseases being just one.  A remote monitoring system would allow patients to be isolated from this potentially hazardous environment while allowing the system to automatically alert the hospital of a potentially dangerous situation in the patients physiological parameters. The proof of concept system developed by QinetiQ allows physiological data to be collected from patient wearable monitors on a 24x7 basis and analysed for potentially life threatening trends and values. If this is detected, or the patient indicates to the monitor that he / she is feeling "unwell" then the patient is alerted and asked to attach themselves to a conventional patient side monitor in the patients home.  More comprehensive data is thus collected for a period of about ten minutes and sent to the hospital for storage.  At the same time the clinicians are alerted via an e-mail / pager message.  By logging into the system on their standard desktop PC the clinicians can look at the data and make an assessment of the seriousness of the situation. In addition to the detailed data collected when an abnormal situation is detected the system sends regular samples of physiological parameters to the hospital for review.  FOR FURTHER DESCRIPTION SEE UNDER 'DEVELOPMENT PLAN'