Patient monitors are electronic medical devices which were first designed to assist anaesthesiologists to assess the vital signs of a patient undergoing surgery. Subsequently, doctors thought it could be additionally utilized in monitoring critically ill patients and hence, were born the modern ICU monitors which display more than 36 physiologic parameters including complex variables like central venous pressure and atrial pressure.

Patient monitors display a particular physiologic parameter with the help of a specific sensor. A typical ICU monitor will use an arterial catheter and an external pressure cuff to assess the blood pressure, a pulse oximeter to read the oxygen saturation of blood, and external transducers to measure the heart rate and the respiratory rate. In critically ill patients, a pulmonary artery (PA) catheter is used to acquire variables like central venous pressure, cardiac output, PA pressure, right atrial pressure etc.

ICU monitors have been in use since the 1970s and since then, have been enhanced and developed to suit the needs of different hospital settings. A number of these variants are available at Drugdu.com (Ddu), the leading medical device platform. A few of the ICU monitors offered by Ddu are the mTouch 8 and mTouch 9 ICU Patient Monitor, Waterproof ICU monitor, the SY-C005 Hospital multi-parameter ICU portable patient monitor and various others.