Saving lives with wearable, wireless monitor

There is no good place to have a heart attack—and no guarantee you’ll survive, even if you are lucky enough to already be in a hospital. The key to survival and best chance for recovery is a rapid response.

The Datascope Patient Monitoring Group recognized the need to identify a cardiac arrhythmia event in patients who were not typically monitored. The challenge was to create a patient monitoring device that would reliably alert hospital staff, move easily throughout the hospital with the patient and be affordable enough to monitor all patients in the hospital.

The product required a full system design and engineering approach to carefully consider all tradeoffs in usability, functional performance, site management, and total cost of ownership.

The resulting NetGuard Patient Monitoring System includes a reusable, body-worn device with extremely low-powered wireless electronics and a wireless network access point. The low-cost, resource-constrained wearable device contains software for ECG signal acquisition and analysis, as well as IEEE 802.15.4 wireless networking protocols, power management and a disposable ECG adhesive electrode.

Stratos’ experience in patient monitoring, wireless systems development, wearable human factors, and miniaturized electronics provided the expertise to successfully navigate the requirements and meet project objectives.

Learn more about NetGuard in the emergency room:
Wireless Cardiac Event Alert Monitoring is Feasible and Effective in the Emergency Department and Adjacent Waiting Areas, Pollack, Charles V. Jr MA, MD, FACEP, FAAEM, FAHA, ritical Pathways in Cardiology: A Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine:
March 2009 – Volume 8 – Issue 1 – pp 7-11

To learn more about In-Hospital Arrest:

Delayed Time to Defibrillation After In Hospital Cardiac Arrest, P.S. Chan, New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 358, Number 1, January 3, 2008

Survival After Tachyarrhythmic Arrest- What Are We Waiting For?, L.A. Saxon, New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 358, Number 1, January 3, 2008

Hospitals Slow In Heart Cases, Research Finds, Denise Grady, The New York Times, January 3, 2008