Your Bed Is Talking About You

Scientists at the University of New Hampshire are trying to get all the technology in an operating room to cooperate and talk to each other. They’re using an automotive industry tool called CANopen to get different manufacturers’ products all speaking the same language, with the goal of simplifying patient management:

Ojala and Waters are now moving their research into what LaCourse calls “closing the loop.” If they want the patient’s blood pressure to stay steady, at say 140 over 90, can they program the bed to automatically rise and fall to maintain that blood pressure? “We’re trying to see if we can not only get the bed and the monitor to talk to each other but also control each other,” says LaCourse.
Ultimately, LaCourse hopes to demonstrate that this “plug-and-play” technology can be adopted by all electronic instruments in operating rooms: Beds and blood pressure monitors as well as ventilation systems, ultrasound monitors, and electrocardiogram monitors will have CANopen software installed by the manufacturers. Doctors and medical personnel will simply push certain buttons for certain procedures instead of manually or mentally calibrating the instruments to each other as they now must do.

Their goal of fine-tuning BP measurements in surgery is all well and good, but smarter floor alarms that this technology would enable — such as if an intubated patient’s bed wasn’t at the proper 30 degree elevation… well…
Daring to dream, imagine if telemetry monitors could correlate a drop in pulse-ox with a bed’s report that the patient was struggling to sit up? Or that the patient’s heart didn’t stop, rather, he just disconnected his leads when he went to the bathroom? That would be real progress.
More from the University of New Hampshire…