Pulser
The Pulser seeks to offer an alternative to the hospital alarm system.
Introduction
In the advent of modern medical care, a lot of effort has taken place to make hospitals more responsive to patients and ensure emergencies are dealt with the highest efficiency. To ensure proper care is provided, current hospitals have various instruments to monitor various parameters in a patient and also use the electronic health records to track the medical history of patients. To ensure timely care, current hospitals use various technologies such as monitors which route to the central console that alert health practitioners. These alerts or alarms can be visual and auditory and their rate in hospitals tends to be extremely high.
These alarms or beeps emanate from machines such as medication pumps, monitors, beds, ventilators, vital sign machines, and feeding pumps and a lot of them tend to be false ranging from 72-99% of alarms [1]. The vast variety of alarms from various machines and the high rate of false positives tend to lead to alarm fatigue among nurses and physicians alike.
Our solution provides an integrated solution to reduce load among nurses and reduce alarm fatigue among health practitioners.
System Overview
The system begins with a simple bandage-like wearable that has a small micro-controller system which has wireless technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth to be connected with the mobile or directly connected to the Hospital WiFi network.
This system can be reused similar to how scrubs are reused. Where the central disc can be detached and attached to a new bandage every day. The controller comes with two buttons, one which accepts a patient and the other rejects due to the physician being busy.
Prototype Flow
The flow is mostly in a linear fashion starting from when the patient enters the hospital or when monitor indicates an emergency
1. Patient data and ticket generated on entry
2. Based on patient condition and level of emergency, task forwarded to one of the doctors on duty. The message is automatically transmitted on to the specific doctor by the wearable in the form of light electric impulses
3. After doctor treats patient, the nurse verifies this using a mobile/tab app and the information is forwarded to the database emptying a slot on queue.
Sample Storyboard
Design Reasonings
Modular Design
The pulser's unique modular design allows the system to be used in various departments of the hospital including the ED, ICU and other departments. Focusing more specifically on the ED where tracking the patient's vitals are extremely important, instead of the nurse using informal means to contact a physician during an emergency, the nurse would just have to click the monitor calling an emergency which would directly route to an available doctor.
Communication Guarantees
As long as the device is stuck to the doctor and is inside the hospital, the pulser will be able to doctor of any impending emergency. The details of the emergency will be forwarded to the doctor's mobile so as to provide the patient's background and medical history. The on-board WiFi and the Bluetooth stack would provide communication between the wearable with the doctor's mobile and also be directly connected to the doctor allowing access to the doctor in all kind of emergencies.
Easy Integration
As the device is a separate system not replacing a system but rather creating a system, we are able to reduce times in contacting a doctor and make the life of a nurse more easier as all it takes is a click to forward emergencies to the concerned doctors. Added with this, we aim to make the system to built on existing databases and monitoring systems allowing ease of access and use.
