Goodbye to the doorbell: an Israeli device, attached to the bed frame, records the patient’s pulse, breathing and movements and signals anomalies to the nursing staff.
The device, through advanced algorithms, predicts the risk of night falls, prevents bedsores and helps to manage patients suffering from dementia. It also monitors the quality of sleep.
The system is called “Vitalerter” and is produced by the Israeli company STS. Vitalerter consists of two parts: the first, “Vitals”, is a sensor of only 8.4 x 4.1 cm and 2.5 cm thick to be fixed to the bed network and connect to WiFi; the second, “Vitalerter”, is the software that centrally collects the readings of all sensors in the structure and sends voice notifications to the staff on duty.
The system is able to trigger alarms when it detects that the patient is about to get up or has sat on the bed, when he or she has not returned to bed within a set time margin, but also when his or her heart rate or breathing is outside the intervals defined by the doctors.
In all these situations, the nurses can be alerted and directly go to the room of the patient for whom the system has given the report.
In addition, for patients with reduced mobility and at risk of bedsore ulcers, Vitalerter can be a valuable ally, alerting caregivers when it is necessary to turn the person on one side, on the other or on the back; the system also recognizes if the movement has been done correctly or if, for example, the patient has been mistakenly repositioned on the same side.
In the UK the system is already widely used and the facilities that have adopted it have observed reductions of up to 50% in the number of falls and up to 70% in the bedsores of patients undergoing treatment.
Digital-health 