Study finds wireless sock monitors reduce rate of patient falls in hospital setting

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

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

Knowledge was collected on 569 sufferers who have been hospitalized within the main tutorial medical middle’s neurological and neurosurgical models throughout 13 months of the examine interval. These models focus on stroke, orthopedics, neurosurgery, normal 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 may typically result in damage or demise. We all know that present fall prevention measures don’t work persistently,” mentioned 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 fee among the many sufferers sporting these socks than the historic fall fee of 4 falls per 1,000 patient-days.”

Throughout 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 protection occasions (or 99.8%) have been true affected person stands, Moore mentioned.

At admission to the hospital, sufferers’ fall threat scores have been assessed by nurses primarily based on the hospital’s evaluation software. 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, comparable to chair or mattress alarms or TeleSitter was used for these sufferers.

The protection system consists of the socks with built-in strain sensors that detect when a affected person is making an attempt to face up, together with interrelated units with sensors that alternate knowledge over a wi-fi community. The system additionally contains an in-room pill for every affected person room, a neighborhood server, a monitoring system on the nurses’ station and “Good Badge” notification units worn by the nurses, mentioned 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 means 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 inside 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 Good Badges logged into the alarming unit, Baker mentioned.

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

Fall prevention measures normally deal with affected person training, growing nurse consciousness, or preventive measures comparable to putting in mattress and chair strain sensors. In hospitals, mattress and chair strain sensors are quite common as a result of most falls happen when sufferers attempt to get away from bed to aim to make use of the bathroom. Regardless of their widespread use, different research have proven that mattress and chair strain sensors don’t stop falls in hospitals.

“A significant downside with mattress and chair strain sensors is that the excessive numbers of false alarms could trigger ‘alarm fatigue’ that may contribute to delayed response,” Bodine mentioned. “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 strain sensors haven’t been printed, and researchers didn’t have historic response occasions for taking part models.

“Nevertheless, our workers 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 scientific workers members, and notified nurses instantly as an alternative of not directly by means of a nurse station,” Moore mentioned.

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