Doctors are usually happy when a patient can get out of bed, but sometimes it’s a cause for concern — with falls and fractures being a significant cause of morbidity. Nurses can’t watch every bed all the time, but a Japanese medical supplier is trying to help:
Nipro, a leading Japanese medical device manufacturer, announced on November 14 that it has developed Tento-Mushi, a system to detect patient movements and alert when the patient accidentally leaves a bed. The company began shipping the product to medical institutions nationwide on the same day.
Based on a prototype detector developed by Osaka City University, the new system connects a collar of the patient to the existing nurse call system by a clip, monitors the behavior of the patient and sends an alert to nurses or caretakers through the nurse call system when the patient tries to leave the bed.
The company expects that the Tento-Mushi system will contribute to preventing patients, in particular the elderly or bedridden, from falling off the bed while reducing the burden on nurses and caretakers. One unit sells for 23,100 yen ($200).
This kind of device sounds far preferable to the earsplitting alarms that go off now whenever a patient breaks the bed-circuit. As for what it looks like, we’re still in the dark — all our web-sleuthing uncovered, is that Tentomushi is Japanese for ladybug.
More (but not much more) from Nipro…