Wearable Technology for Hospital Inpatients

Overall Hypothesis:

The use of wearable personal fitness trackers to monitor physiologic signals in hospital inpatients is feasible, reliable, secure, and cost effective.

Specific Objectives:

• To evaluate the feasibility of applying a wrist-worn personal fitness tracker to hospital inpatients for the purpose of monitoring heart rate and sleep quality during the night.
• To determine the accuracy and completeness of high-frequency heart rate measurements recorded from personal fitness trackers in hospital inpatients.
• To compare measurements of sleep quality generated by personal fitness trackers with clinical assessments by nursing staff among hospital inpatients.
• To develop a workflow and data analysis pipeline for downloading, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data generated by personal fitness trackers worn by hospital inpatients.
• To evaluate the feasibility of a larger prospective multicenter trial examining the utility of personal fitness trackers among hospital inpatients, including recruitment rates, inclusion/exclusion criteria, data management protocols, and outcomes measures.

Inclusion criteria

• Adult patients (age > 18 years)
• Spontaneously breathing (i.e. no invasive or non-invasive mechanical ventilation, with the exception of nocturnal non-invasive ventilation at stable home settings)
• Cardiac telemetry and/or continuous SpO2 monitoring in place

Exclusion criteria

• Continuous sedation or analgesia
• Known upper extremity deep venous thrombosis
• Dialysis fistula
• Radial arterial line in the non-dominant arm
• Peripherally inserted central venous catheter in the non-dominant arm
• Severe upper extremity trauma or fracture
• History of upper extremity amputation
• Skin breakdown at application site
• Contact precautions (methicillin resistant Staph aureus, C. difficile, vancomycin resistant Enterococcus)