EarlySense Granted United States Patent For Respiratory Trend Analysis Capability For Contact-Free, Patient Safety Monitoring System

EarlySense, the market leader in Proactive Patient Care Solutions, announced recently that the company has been granted a United States patent for the respiratory trend analysis component of its contact-free, patient safety monitoring system.

The EarlySense solution is designed to help medical teams in the medical surgical departments of hospitals to proactively respond to early warning signs of deterioration and avoid adverse events and excessive length of stay.

US Patent number 8,376,954 is titled Techniques for prediction and monitoring of respiration-manifested clinical episodes.The technology provides a contact-free method for predicting and monitoring a clinical episode. It does so by sensing the breathing of a patient, then determining the breathing pattern of the patient, and finally, analyzing any trends longer than one hour and comparing them with a baseline. Inventors include three of four of the company’s founders: Dr. Daniel Lange, Yossi Gross and Avner Halperin.

The results of a multi-site clinical trial, recently published, in an article titled Early Recognition of Acutely Deteriorating Patients in Non- Intensive Care Units: Assessment of an Innovative Monitoring Technology, by the Journal of Hospital Medicine, found that changes in trends identified by the EarlySense system were highly valuable in detecting the early warning signs of patient deterioration. Please click here to view the abstract and for access to the full set of results.

Dr. Jeffrey Rothschild, M.D.,Clinical Device Director at Partners Healthcare, Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the aforementioned paper said, “We have known for a long time that beyond the absolute values of a patient’s breathing and respiratory rate, effective analysis of trends enables earlier detection of deterioration. This facilitates timely staff intervention which can improve patient outcomes by averting or ameliorating adverse events. The multi-center research results showed that the trends, detected by the EarlySense system, enable effective identification of warning signs of deterioration utilizing respiratory trends with a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 64%. Our paper supports the claim that continuous monitoring of cardiac and respiratory trends on general care floors is effective in facilitating early detection of deterioration in order to improve patient outcomes.”

EarlySense CEO, Mr. Avner Halperin said, “EarlySense is proud to be the first company to provide continuous, ‘contact-free’ trend analysis tools for the general care floors. As there are no cumbersome leads or cuffs, patients enjoygreater comfort and freedom of movement and, nurses are not burdened with extra work and alarm fatigue.To date, EarlySense has logged more than five million hours of patient monitoring hours and has received clinical reports from three continents analyzing the findings. The reports cite hundreds of cases where, based on information received from the EarlySense system, clinicians saved patient lives as well as averted adverse events in the form of patient deterioration brought on, for example, by respiratory depression. The fact that EarlySense’s trend indications are now not only patent protected but also clinically shown to provide valuable indications of deterioration further supports the growing sentiment that this technology is on its way to becoming the standard of care.”

Halperin continued, “Historically continuous patient monitoring was limited to the more Acute Healthcare environments, such as an ICU. However, by designing the EarlySense System with the less acute environments in mind, the company has designed and introduced a system which produces fewer alarms, and alleviates the challenges that may be produced by having patients attached to leads and cuffs. Having a system, in the various environments within the healthcare system, which is capable of detecting potentially harmful situations early, notifying clinicians immediately, and offering quality reporting in an effort to provide continuous feedback for improvement, is essential in today’s healthcare environment. These deliverables help medical teams to better manage a challenging workload created by shortages of competent clinicians and increased patient loads, increase the quality of patient care and save hospitals money, a distinct advantage as hospitals continue to search for cost improvements due to shrinking margins.” 

About EarlySense
EarlySense has brought to market an innovative technology designed to advance proactive patient care and enable clinicians to achieve better patient outcomes, by assisting in preventing adverse events from occurring through the early identification of deterioration. The company’s flagship product, the EarlySense System, is a continuous, contact-free, patient safety monitoring solution that monitors and documents a patient’s vital signs and movement using a sensor that is placed underneath a bed mattress. There are no leads or cuffs to connect to the patient who has complete freedom of movement and is not burdened by any cumbersome attachments. The system was initially designed to monitor non-ICU ‘lower risk’ patients on medical surgical floors who are usually monitored by nursing staff approximately once every four hours. The system is currently installed at hospitals and rehabilitation centers in the USA and Europe.  It is also commercially available in Canada. Hospital administrators report that patients, their families and staff feel more comfortable knowing the system is in place.  EarlySense Inc. is headquartered in Waltham, MA.  Investors include: JK&B, Pitango Venture Capital, Etgar Challenge Fund, ProSeed VC Fund, Docor International Management, Noaber, and Bridge Investment Fund, and Peter Soderberg, managing partner of Worthy Ventures Resources, LLC and former president and CEO of Hill-Rom Holdings, Inc. For more information, visit www.earlysense.com.