A Patient Deterioration Warning System for Boosting Situational Awareness of Monitored Patients

Current patient monitoring solutions struggle with high rates of false alarms, which potentially lead to dismissal of clinically relevant alarms. This risk is in particular present in emergency departments and acute bed wards where highly heterogeneous patients are treated in rapid succession. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Patient Deterioration Warning System prototype. The prototype addresses these issues by providing a summarized, easy to grasp representation of monitored patients to improve the situational awareness of nurses. The prototype has been evaluated by 18 nurses on 50 patients, and achieved an agreement rate of 78%. The proposed system enables nurses to quickly and accurately gain insight into the state and trajectory of monitored patients over a period of 24 hours.