Why my mom should wear a ViSi Mobile
Devin McCombie, PhD, Chief Science Officer at Sotera Wireless, Inc.
Unfortunately, at some point in our lives a friend, a neighbor, a family member, and even our mom will need to spend time in a hospital. While the nurses, doctors, and staff who care for our loved ones are truly amazing people and do an incredible job, it is a fact that adverse events happen to many post-surgical patients during their initial hospital stay.1
ViSi Mobile: Keeping an Eye on Life
In the majority of general care hospital settings in the United States, patients have their vital signs checked once every 4-6 hours. Patients can rapidly deteriorate in between these spot checks without any indications to the clinical staff. Imagine someone close to you going into the hospital for surgery, experiencing an unmonitored event, and never coming home.
What if we could give nurses the ability to continuously monitor a patient’s vital signs and allow them to remotely receive the patient’s status? Then adverse events could be detected in time for clinicians to act and save the patient from harm.
The solution to this problem exists in a remarkable product called ViSi Mobile. ViSi Mobile is a compact, wearable vital sign monitor that continuously streams data through a hospital’s wireless network.
This vision, to prevent “failure to rescue” events in the general ward with a wearable, continuous monitor, has been an idea that I have pursued passionately for more than ten years.
Sotera Wireless: Passionate and Committed People
While the idea is easy to understand, making ViSi Mobile a truly great product that hospital staff trust and rely on has been an enormous challenge. Accuracy, reliability, workflow, the employees of Sotera Wireless have embraced solving these issues with passion and a shared commitment to this vision. The desire to learn, solve, and innovate around a complex technology like ViSi Mobile has been a uniquely rewarding experience for all of us. It has helped us persevere through challenging times. This company was not founded for short term gain but to solve a big problem by people focused on perfection and not willing to give up easily.
Wearable Monitoring: The Future
The age of wearable health monitoring has become a reality. The convergence of technologies that allowed us to build ViSi Mobile, from small, low power electronics to advanced machine learning algorithms for our vital signs, have paved a path that will help transform the medical monitoring industry in the next five years. It will allow us to move beyond the simple threshold alarms that are used to detect patient deterioration today to smart and predictive alarms that can recognize events much earlier and provide even better outcomes for patients. It is an exciting time to be a part of this discovery and innovation.
A problem exists in hospitals today, a technology has emerged to solve this problem, a technology developed by a team of dedicated people focused on perfection, and the future is set for further innovation. It is time to make continuous monitoring the standard-of-care on hospital general care floors so that all patients, especially our moms, can wear a ViSi Mobile monitor and come home safe.