By Debra Wood, RN, contributor
Monitoring patients has become easier for many nurses thanks to a mattress pad that reports patients’ heart and respiratory rates, and alerts nurses of readings outside set parameters.
The LifeBed senses and reports heart and respiratory rates with no wires connected to the patient.
“The nurses love it,” said Cindy Kamikawa, RN, MS, vice president of nursing at Queen’s Medical Center, in Honolulu, Hawaii, which has installed the Hoana LifeBedTM Patient Vigilance System on 92 beds on medical-surgical units with post-operative and oncology patients. “It truly is like another pair of eyes.”
Sensors in the zip-on, washable mattress cover provide continuous heart and respiratory rate data. Nothing attaches to the patient. A monitor sits next to the bed and picks up the signals. Hoana presets defaults, but nurses can easily program the sensors to alarm at rates specific to their patients.
“We have caught someone going into atrial fibrillation, that we had checked vital signs on an hour before,” Kamikawa said. “It’s an early warning system.”
Nurses at Queen’s have also picked up respiratory depression in patients receiving patient- controlled narcotics. The hospital has monitored nurse and patient satisfaction, fall rates and cardiac arrests. Kamikawa notes positive trends in the preliminary data.
Hoana received Food and Drug Administration approval for the LifeBed in 2006 and has sold or leased the beds to hospitals and other inpatient facilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. The company also makes LifeGurney, a pad for emergency room stretchers.
Pomerado Hospital in Poway, California, piloted the covers for about eight months before deciding to place them on all the facility’s medical-surgical beds. The nurses felt the covers provided a valuable service and they found the device easy to use, said Valerie Martinez, RN, BSN, director of medical-surgical telemetry at Pomerado Hospital.
“It’s a great tool for the med-surg nurse, to help them monitor the patients when they can’t be in there,” Martinez said. “You can go back and trend things.”
The nurse can assess what the alert was for and how many times it activated.
“It gives a heads up to subtle changes in condition,” added Sonia Collazo, RN, MSN, a former nurse manager on a post-ICU unit at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Florida, that uses the beds. “It gives you extra awareness that something is happening.”
“It allows the nurse to be more involved in the early recognition of patients that are starting to fail,” said Heather Herdman, RN, Ph.D., chief operating officer of Hoana. “It provides data that brings the nurse to the bedside.”
Herdman hopes the data, especially early respiratory changes, will help nurses and physicians prevent severe conditions that could be missed.
“We see it as a safeguard for the nurse and the patient,” Herdman said.
The LifeBed also has a bed exit alarm, with three push-button settings for patients at different fall risk. At high risk, the bed will alert if the patient lifts his or her head or shoulders off the bed. For moderate risk patients, it waits until the patient sits up and for low risk it delays issuing an alarm until the patient actually exits the bed. Loved ones or the nurse can program the device to play a personalized, prerecorded message to get back into bed and wait for the nurse.
“It’s very helpful for Alzheimer’s patients or the elderly,” Herdman said. “They hear a human voice, saying ‘I’m coming to get you,’ and they will stop and wait.”
Martinez said patients do not feel or see the sensors. Once the patient understands the system, she said, “it makes them feel more secure and safe.”
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