Remote Patient Care — Bedside Cart Terminal
Bedside cart kiosk for remote care — Windows native + Zoom SDK.
Highlights
- Built the cart-kiosk dashboard UI with live patient telemetry and session controls
- OCR-driven patient admission: AForge webcam capture → remote OCR service → auto-populated admission fields from ID cards
- Authored a standalone Windows maintenance service (IPC + localhost HTTP) coordinating the WPF client and background update flows
- Maintained the IPC backbone between the client, maintenance service, and a localhost status server exposed for third-party integrators
- Shipped WiX v4 MSI bundles with C# CustomActions for multi-component install/upgrade
- Integrated the native Zoom Windows SDK through a C++/C# interop wrapper for in-session AV
Problem
The bedside cart is the bring-up surface for a remote-care visit — wheeled into a hospital room, woken by the bedside nurse, pointed at the patient. It has to do hospital-IT-grade things (kiosk lockdown, signed install, IPC with whatever monitoring agent the site already runs) and clinician-grade things (one-tap consultation start, ID-card admission, live device telemetry) on the same Windows machine, without either side cracking the other.
Approach
WPF dashboard owns the operator-facing surface; a separate Windows service owns install lifecycle, auto-update, and the IPC backbone. The two talk over named pipes plus a localhost HTTP status endpoint that third-party integrators on the hospital side can scrape without touching the kiosk UI. Patient admission goes through an OCR pipeline — AForge captures from the cart’s webcam, frames go to a remote OCR service, returned fields drop straight into the admission form so the clinician doesn’t retype. In-session AV runs through the native Zoom Windows SDK behind a C++/C# interop wrapper, which keeps the WPF layer ignorant of SDK internals. Install is a WiX v4 MSI bundle with C# CustomActions handling multi-component upgrade — important because hospital IT sometimes can’t take the cart offline for a manual reinstall.
Result
Deployed across 50 US hospitals as the bedside endpoint of the remote-care product. The two-process split (WPF client + maintenance service) survives auto-update without dropping an active session — the original failure mode the architecture was designed to eliminate.