0 Monitoring stress of patients in ICUs

Here's a link to an intriguing paper produced by Julia Somerdin, a participant in the MIT System Design and Management program.

She states the challenge:

A cost-effective, reliable, and real-time information system for monitoring the stress of patients in intensive care units (ICUs) is missing from current ICU systems. This presents an important opportunity because [among other things]:

• ICU patients, often unable to report on their stress and pain levels, rely primarily on nurses' training and knowledge—yet, because nurses can visit patients only periodically, pain can only be assessed intermittently;
• Pain and stress ratings are often subjective, even guesswork, and nurses treating the same patients often disagree with each other because of their varying levels of training and experience.

She offers an approach:

ICU Cam enables non-invasive monitoring of stress and pain using a remote smart camera mounted on top of a patient's bed. Its capabilities include:

• remotely measuring stress during complex dexterity tasks, such as surgery; and
• transfer of reliable real-time results to physicians via data visualization.

With these tools:

The embedded software system consists of four modules:

1. Camera server-side data collection and processing
2. Networking module for Wi-Fi transmission
3. Client-side data receiver
4. Graphical user interface that provides data regeneration and interpretation.

With these results:

During lab testing, ICU Cam measured heart rate and heart rate variability with over 96 percent accuracy. Additional benefits may include:

• Early detection of pain to help doctors provide early relief to patients incapable of self-reporting;
• Reduced length of ICU stay, resulting in substantial savings for hospitals and insurance companies; and
• Increased ICU efficiency and reduced nurse workload.

I'm sure she'd like to know your reactions to all this!  Please comment here.