Clinical Support System
Ward 24/7
The Challenge
The WARD system is a continuous and automatic monitoring and alarm system for vital values in hospitalised patients. The system consists of several components: wireless sensors that can measure the patients' vital values continuously and send data wirelessly to a database and to an app that presents the patients' condition to the care staff on their work device (phone or computer).
Patients admitted to hospitals in Denmark have their vital values (pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, breathing rate, etc.) measured several times a day, manually by a hospital employee. The patients' vital values are an expression of their physical condition and capacity, and in sick persons these values will therefore often be deviant. For example, a patient with pneumonia will often have too high a breathing rate, too high a temperature and too low oxygen saturation in the blood, while a healthy person will have values within the normal range. Patients who experience a worsening of their disease will often have more and more deviant parameters over time, and the values can therefore be used to risk assess the patients, and acute changes in the patients condition are often preceded by periods of deviant numbers.
The manual measurements themselves are a significant work task for the staff in the health sector, as ALL hospitalised patients must have measured values with 4-5 different devices between 2 and 24 times a day. At the same time, time passes between each measurement (anything between 1-12 hours), during which the staff do not know the patient's vital values, and where clinical deterioration can potentially occur for the patients without the staff's knowledge. This is unsafe for the patients, but also for the staff. It is particularly the vulnerable group of patients (demented, impaired consciousness, etc.) who cannot tell themselves when they are getting worse, who are at risk of complications without it being detected. Deteriorations in patients' conditions can, for example, lead to admission to intensive care and ultimately death.
At the same time, the staff can save time on performing the manual tasks with the measurements, and this time can be spent on care and maintenance instead.
The Solution
The WARD system is a continuous and automatic monitoring and alarm system for vital values in hospitalised patients.
The system consists of several components: wireless sensors that can measure the patients' vital values continuously and send data wirelessly to a database and to an app that presents the patients' condition to the care staff on their work device (phone or computer).
In the app, the nurses can see the patient's values and graphs of trends and be alerted when the vital values exceed a limit. In this way, the nurses can focus on their work of dosing and distributing medicine, caring for the patients and much more, while they can access their patient's physical condition on the app in their pocket at any time.
They will be visually and auditory alerted if there is a reason for it, and this creates security for both staff and patients.
At the same time, the staff can save time on performing the manual tasks with the measurements, and this time can be spent on care and maintenance instead.
The Result
Real life tests to place at hospitals and the Ward Solution proved extremely succesful:
Ward detected a low blood saturation in 97% of the cases tested, traditional methods only detected 43%
Ward detected 57% of the cases with a significant sleep apnea against 23% in traditional methods.
This significantly increases the chance of the hospital staff to catch serious deceases before they become a dangerous condition.
The solution won the gold Data Science award 2022 at the Danish Digital Awards.
“Gold is given to a case that solves an extremely current and serious problem – a question of life or death. The solution shows an in-depth knowledge of the users' workflows and daily challenges, and the first results leave no doubt about the solution's great potential - in its current form, through further utilisation via data science as well as in spin-offs for other industries and purposes. The jury is looking forward to following the further development.” - Jury