Contact-Free Monitoring of Pulse Rate For Triage of Patients Presenting to the Emergency Department

Background: The evaluation of a patient's pulse rate (PR) plays a key role in emergency triage and is commonly measured in a contact-dependent way.

Objective: Our aims were to evaluate a camera-based prototype application (CBPA) measuring PR in an emergency department (ED) as an alternative to the current contact-dependent method of pulse oximetry and to determine the correlation between CBPA and pulse oximetry in measuring PR.

Methods: We simultaneously measured PR with CBPA and pulse oximetry as a reference method on a large group of ED walk-in patients. We then estimated correlation and agreement between the two methods, as well as the corresponding 95% confidence intervals.

Results: In a convenience sample of 446 patients, the correlation between CBPA and pulse oximetry in measuring PR was 0.939 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.927-0.949) and the intraclass correlation was 0.939 (95% CI 0.927-0.949).

Conclusions: Our study found that CBPA seems to be a viable alternative to the current method of measuring PR at triage. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03393585.