One of the hazards of hospital emergency rooms is that patients can deteriorate without staff noticing. Now they can be given a device to monitor their vital signs.
The (SMART), developed by Dorothy Curtis and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, consists of an infrared blood oxygen sensor that clips onto a finger, and chest electrodes that monitor heartbeat. Both are attached to a PDA that sits in a belt pack and runs software that monitors their readings, and sounds the alarm if they change to a worrying extent. It also beams the data to a PC monitored by a paramedic.
In tests on 145 volunteers in the ER at Brigham and Women鈥檚 Hospital in Boston, SMART flagged three patients who were stable when admitted but later developed dangerously irregular heartbeats.
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