Examine finds wi-fi sock displays scale back price of affected person falls in hospital setting

Analysis led by nurses at The Ohio State College Wexner Medical Middle has discovered {that a} new wi-fi sock monitoring system diminished fall charges amongst “fall-risk” sufferers hospitalized at Ohio State’s Mind and Backbone Hospital. Actually, not one of the sufferers who have been on a fall-risk protocol fell whereas carrying the socks over 2,211.6 patient-days throughout the examine.

The examine evaluated the effectiveness of Palarum’s PUP (Affected person is Up) Sensible Socks and findings are revealed on-line within the Journal of Nursing Care High quality.

Knowledge was collected on 569 sufferers who have been hospitalized within the main educational medical heart’s neurological and neurosurgical models throughout 13 months of the examine interval. These models specialise in stroke, orthopedics, neurosurgery, basic neurology and epilepsy. Initially deliberate to enroll 2,500 sufferers, the examine ended early due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Sufferers can fall whereas they’re hospitalized, and this will generally result in harm or loss of life. We all know that current fall prevention measures don’t work persistently,” stated senior investigator Tammy Moore, Affiliate Chief Nurse of Ohio State’s Neurological Institute and Medical Surgical. “Throughout our examine, we noticed zero falls, which was a decrease fall price among the many sufferers carrying these socks than the historic fall price of 4 falls per 1,000 patient-days.”

In the course of the examine interval, 5,010 security occasions (alarms) have been related to the system. Eleven have been reported to be false alarms, indicating 4,999 of the security occasions (or 99.8%) have been true affected person stands, Moore stated.

At admission to the hospital, sufferers’ fall threat scores have been assessed by nurses primarily based on the hospital’s evaluation instrument. All sufferers enrolled within the examine have been supplied with the socks till discharge or elimination from the autumn threat protocol, and no different fall prevention system, resembling chair or mattress alarms or TeleSitter was used for these sufferers.

The security system consists of the socks with built-in stress sensors that detect when a affected person is attempting to face up, together with interrelated units with sensors that change information over a wi-fi community. The system additionally consists of an in-room pill for every affected person room, an area server, a monitoring machine on the nurses’ station and “Sensible Badge” notification units worn by the nurses, stated Chris Baker, co-founder and vice-president for enterprise improvement at Palarum.

When the socks detect an try to face up, the system alerts the three nurses it finds closest to the alarming room by way of their badges. When a nurse with a badge then enters the affected person’s room, the alert is routinely deactivated. If none of these nurses enter the room throughout the first 60 seconds, the alarm escalates to the following three closest. If nobody responds inside 90 seconds, the system proceeds to an “all name” to all Sensible Badges logged into the alarming unit, Baker stated.

“Because of the quickly growing old inhabitants, the variety of sufferers at greater threat of falling in hospitals is anticipated to extend considerably. About 30% of in-hospital falls are considered preventable, so it is crucial to find out higher methods to maintain our sufferers protected from falling whereas hospitalized,” stated examine co-author Tina Bodine, a nurse navigator at Ohio State’s Neurological Institute.

Fall prevention measures often deal with affected person schooling, rising nurse consciousness, or preventive measures resembling putting in mattress and chair stress sensors. In hospitals, mattress and chair stress sensors are quite common as a result of most falls happen when sufferers attempt to get off the bed to try to make use of the bathroom. Regardless of their widespread use, different research have proven that mattress and chair stress sensors don’t stop falls in hospitals.

“A serious downside with mattress and chair stress sensors is that the excessive numbers of false alarms could trigger ‘alarm fatigue’ that may contribute to delayed response,” Bodine stated. “With this technique, no falls have been detected, and solely 0.2% of the alarms have been false alarms. We additionally analyzed nurse response occasions that ranged from 1 second to just about 10 minutes and located that the median nurse response time was 24 seconds.”

Nurse response occasions to mattress and chair stress sensors haven’t been revealed, and researchers didn’t have historic response occasions for collaborating models.

“Nevertheless, our employees believed that response occasions have been improved in contrast with using mattress and chair alarms, amongst others, as a result of alarm notifications included room numbers, focused the three closest medical employees members, and notified nurses immediately as an alternative of not directly by way of a nurse station,” Moore stated.

The analysis group additionally included collaborators with Ohio State’s Middle for Biostatistics and Wake Forest College of Medication.