Background: Millions of catheters for invasive arterial pressure monitoring are placed annually in intensive care units, emergency rooms, and operating rooms to guide medical treatment decision-making. Accurate assessment of arterial blood pressure requires an IV pole-attached pressure transducer placed at the same height as a reference point on the patient's body, typically, the heart. Every time a patient moves, or the bed is adjusted, a nurse or physician must adjust the height of the pressure transducer. There are no alarms to indicate a discrepancy between the patient and transducer height, leading to inaccurate blood pressure measurements.
Methods: We present a low-power wireless wearable tracking device that uses inaudible acoustic signals emitted from a speaker array to automatically compute height changes and correct the mean arterial blood pressure. Performance of this device was tested in 26 patients with arterial lines in place.
Results: Our system calculates the mean arterial pressure with a bias of 0.19, inter-class correlation coefficients of 0.959 and a median difference of 1.6 mmHg when compared to clinical invasive arterial measurements.
Conclusions: Given the increased workload demands on nurses and physicians, our proof-of concept technology may improve accuracy of pressure measurements and reduce the task burden for medical staff by automating a task that previously required manual manipulation and close patient surveillance.
Arterial catheters are commonly inserted in hospitalized, critically ill patients to measure blood pressure. For these systems to work properly, a device that measures pressure, called a pressure transducer, must be connected to the catheter, and maintained at the same height as a reference point, usually the heart. So, if the patient moves, the transducer must be manually adjusted by a nurse of physician, adding to the workload of busy clinicians. If not adjusted, this will lead to inaccurate blood pressure measurements. We built a low-power wearable tracking device that uses inaudible acoustic signals to track changes in the patient’s position. These height differences can be used to calculate accurate blood pressure measurements automatically. This device can decrease clinician workload by removing the need to move the transducer by hand, allowing providers to focus on other tasks.
© 2023. The Author(s).