Omnivisi Earable: Continuous and non-invasive monitoring of vital signs

Abstract

In the Maasstad Hospital Department of Surgery in Rotterdam, two types of patients undergo an abdominal surgery: 1) mobile obese patients 2) patients with cancer. These types of patients need personal contact and guidance, especially patients with cancer. However, nurses are overwhelmed with work and utilize a great amount of their time to measure the vital signs of patients three times a day. These vital signs are: heart rate, blood oxygen level, respiration rate, tympanic temperature and blood pressure. The current method of measuring the vital signs is highly inefficient and vulnerable for human error. Additionally, there is a lack of an alarming system that can notify nurses when patients’ health condition deteriorates. There are existing wearable devices in the market but those are not able to measure all aforementioned vital signs. Additionally, these devices do not fulfil the needs and wishes of the user group. The aim of this study is to design a wearable device that is able to continuously and noninvasively measure vital signs of the patients, considering the level of comfort for patients and level of user-friendliness for the nursing staff. Different research and design methods are applied to gain insight in the context of use, users, stakeholders, human factors, technology and organization. These insights are synthesized in different concepts. From these concepts the most innovative and suitable solution the so-called ‘Omnivisi Earable’ concept is selected. Omnivisi Earable is the product ecosystem proposal of this study. It is a compact and wireless wearable that is able to continuously and non-invasively measure a patient’s vital signs. Due to lack of wires and extra modules, it can be easily attached on the patient’s body. The organic form of the Earable provides high comfort for patients. The time saved to manually measure patients’ vital signs will be used for personal contact and guidance of the patient. Keywords: health data, human factors, continuous monitoring, human centred design, wearable, vital signs, participatory design, medical device, e-health