Remote digital monitoring part of COVID-19 response

Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and its charity CW+ are playing a central role in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak across the community. In addition to caring for patients in our hospitals during this unprecedented health emergency, the Trust is also involved in temporary NHS facilities that have been set up where travellers from abroad are being quarantined for up to 2-week periods.

Thanks to donations to our CW+ COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund and support from Sensium, part of The Surgical Company Group, a remote digital monitoring solution is up and running at a facility near Heathrow to monitor respiratory rate, temperature and heart rate of individuals in quarantine. The Sensium® system is already being used in the Trust and comprises a lightweight wearable sensor, which is attached to the individual’s chest and measures key vital signs every two minutes, compared with current monitoring standards by a healthcare professional every 4-6 hours. The data can be seen by health care staff and can be used to generate notifications alarms to let staff know if the patient’s health condition is deteriorating.

 

In addition to monitoring for patient deterioration, other aims of this in-community trial called the REMOTE-COVID study, include:

  • Understanding which people are most severely affected by COVID-19, particularly those who might go on to need hospital care.
  • Reducing the potential exposure to staff – with current systems, staff have to put on a significant amount of personal protective equipment in order to check on a quarantined person.
  • Collecting feedback from patients and staff about the new technology and most importantly to see if it reduces exposure for the healthcare team to COVID-19.

 

“We are incredibly grateful for the support we have received at this critical time to implement this urgent initiative. Thanks to the amazing response from donors and Sensium, we are able to provide 500 patches with the required software and training at the facility near Heathrow. We hope that this is the first of many innovative initiatives we can roll-out in the coming weeks to help save more lives in these unprecedented times,” says Dr Gary Davies, Consultant Respiratory Physician at the Trust.

 

Chris Chaney, Chief Executive of CW+ leading the COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund, explains how an existing Trust innovation project is helping; “Clinical Research Fellow, Miss Meera Joshi, has been leading the world’s largest cohort study evaluating this innovative wearable patch in our Trust as part of our CW Innovation programme. She can use the datasets from this original study to better understand the implications of changes to respiratory rate, temperature and heart rate in quarantined groups. We believe this is the first time sensors have been used outside of a hospital setting.”

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