ABSTRACT
Pediatric physiological measurements can be grouped into three general classications: measurements associated with well-child care, monitoring of critically ill patients, and monitoring and assessing children at home. In the rst case, measurements are carried out in the oce of a pediatrician, pediatric clinic, or family practitioner while the second case involves making measurements and monitoring patients in critical care hospital units such as the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) or the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Wherever the measurements are made, a general rule should be followed in the design and application of the instrumentation. is rule states that a pediatric patient should not be considered as just a miniature adult. Pediatric patients, especially the very young ones, in addition to being smaller than adults, have body proportions and physiological functions that can be dierent from those of an adult. us, adult measuring techniques may not always be appropriate for use with children even when appropriately scaled for infants. Size, mobility, ability to communicate, and anxiety are factors that can dier considerably between children and adult patients. Although dierent modalities of medical imaging will not be considered in this chapter, the pediatric patient presents special problems in this diagnostic area that point out their dierence from an adult. ese include a strong desire by clinicians to limit children’s exposure to ionizing radiation and the fact that some imaging procedures, such as obtaining an MRI image, require the patient to remain still for periods as long as 30 min as the imaging data are obtained. is is o en dicult for younger children to do, and the patients need to be sedated, a procedure that in itself has risks. In the remaining paragraphs, we will look at some of the measurement techniques used in the care of pediatric patients.
