ST. LOUIS, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- A U.S. hospital is testing a clinical warning system that uses wireless sensors to track the vital signs of at-risk patients and can inform nurses of a problem.
When fully operational, the system's wearable sensors will take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute, transmitting the data to a base station, where computers will look for any signs of clinical deterioration and alert medical personnel, a release from Washington University in St. Louis said Thursday.
The idea of the system, undergoing a feasibility study at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, is to create a virtual intensive care unit where the patients aren't wired to beeping machines but are free to move about, said Chenyang Lu, a computer scientist at Washington University who was the principal investigator for the prototype-network trial.
"Overall, the prototype trial showed that wireless sensor networks can successfully monitor vital signs to support real-time detection of clinical deterioration in patients," Lu says.
