A Cardiopulmonary Monitoring System for Patient Transport Within Hospitals Using Mobile Internet of Things Technology: Observational Validation Study

BACKGROUND: During intrahospital transport, adverse events are inevitable. Real-time monitoring can be helpful for preventing these events during intrahospital transport. OBJECTIVE: We attempted to determine the viability of risk signal detection using wearable devices and mobile apps during intrahospital transport. An alarm was sent to clinicians in the event of oxygen saturation below 90%, heart rate above 140 or below 60 beats per minute (bpm), and network errors. We validated the reliability of the risk signal transmitted over the network. METHODS: We used two wearable devices to monitor oxygen saturation and heart rate for 23 patients during intrahospital transport for diagnostic workup or rehabilitation. To determine the agreement between the devices, records collected every 4 seconds were matched and imputation was performed if no records were collected at the same time by both devices. We used intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) to evaluate the relationships between the two devices. RESULTS: Data for 21 patients were delivered to the cloud over LTE, and data for two patients were delivered over Wi-Fi. Monitoring devices were used for 20 patients during intrahospital transport for diagnostic work up and for three patients during rehabilitation. Three patients using supplemental oxygen before the study were included. In our study, the ICC for the heart rate between the two devices was 0.940 (95% CI 0.939-0.942) and that of oxygen saturation was 0.719 (95% CI 0.711-0.727). Systemic error analyzed with Bland-Altman analysis was 0.428 for heart rate and –1.404 for oxygen saturation. During the study, 14 patients had 20 risk signals: nine signals for eight patients with less than 90% oxygen saturation, four for four patients with a heart rate of 60 bpm or less, and seven for five patients due to network error. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a system that notifies the health care provider of the risk level of a patient during transportation using a wearable device and a mobile app. Although there were some problems such as missing values and network errors, this paper is meaningful in that the previously mentioned risk detection system was validated with actual patients.