When clinicians anaesthetise a patient, there are a lot of things they need to keep an eye on – the patient’s breathing, their heart rate and blood pressure, all while conducting other visually demanding task such as inserting IVs or intubating the patient.
A new technology is taking away some of the demands on the anaesthetist’s visual attention, instead allowing them to monitor the patient’s breathing with sound.
This is so-called “eyes-free monitoring”.
“The “beep, beep, beep” heart monitor (a continuous auditory pulse oximeter) has been around since the 1980s. Most people will recognise it from medical documentaries and hospital dramas. It is currently the most effective tool for detecting when things go wrong,” says Marcus Watson, one of the inventors of the new machine and a Fresh Innovator finalist.
“What we’ve invented is basically the same thing except for respiration. The machine measures the patient’s breathing rate, length of inhalation, length of exhalation, volume and rate of gas exchange and expired carbon dioxide and provides the information in an audible way. It is a very gentle two-tone sound.”
Currently this information is only available visually.
“It is estimated that 93% of potential patient incidents could be detected with the combination of the respiratory sonification and a pulse oximeter (a machine that measures the pulse),” says Marcus. “Our respiratory sonification means critical care staff can detect changes in the patient much earlier than they could with current systems.”
Using the respiratory sonification on simulated patients, anaesthetists were able to monitor the patients just as effectively with the respiratory sonification as they could with a standard visual display. And they were able to perform other timeshared duties better when relying on the respiratory sonification.