Nurses working in busy ICUs or big clinical wards are known to suffer from “alarm fatigue” caused by monitoring devices regularly detecting disconnects, vitals out of range, etc etc. This can be pretty frustrating on the staff and can lead to patients with a more acute status being forgotten in favor of someone else’s minor issue. A new patent recently issued to Nihon Kohden America covers a novel algorithm that aims to reduce false alarms and increase patient safety while helping nurses do their job.
The algorithm uses sliding median filters to process the data coming from clinical monitoring systems. This supposedly allows the algorithm to “smooth” out the data and reduce false positives while not increasing the number of false negatives.
Link to patent: Clinical data monitoring and alarming apparatus and methods…