Continuous Monitoring on the General Ward

Rationale: Monitoring patients' vital signs is done to detect clinical deterioration. For this, the MEWS, a scoring list comprising seven vital signs measured by nursing staff, is used. Although the MEWS provides relevant data on patients' health status, the interval measurements may not capture early deterioration of vital signs, especially during the night. As a result, unsafe situations may occur such as periods of low oxygen saturation and cardiac arrhythmias, which are known to complicate postoperative course. Besides, this way of measuring vital signs may be stressful for patients and disturbs patients' sleep. New technology such as ViSi Mobile and HealthPatch allows for remote continuous monitoring of vital signs using wearable devices transmitting relevant data to nurses and clinicians. With this, the investigators think that clinical deterioration may be detected in an early phase and reduce nurse work load and patient distress.

Objective: to investigate the feasibility of wearable devices on the general ward.

Study design: feasibility study.

Study population: adult patients hospitalized on the internal medicine ward and adult postoperative patients on the surgical ward.

Intervention: patients in the intervention groups will be randomized in one of the two groups. Patients in the group 1 will wear ViSi Mobile; patients in group 2 will wear the HealthPatch. Wearable devices will be worn for at least three days. Regular MEWS measurements take place at usual time points.

Main study parameters/endpoints: Evaluation with patient and care givers (primary outcome measure), MEWS calculations, time between alarm (continuous data) and next regular MEWS measurement (nurse), intervention by nurse after alarm, admission to ICU, complications, side effects of devices, STAI scores, and PCS scores will be documented.

Nature and extent of the burden and risks associated with participation, benefit and group relatedness: Patients will wear one device for at least three days. Devices can be uncomfortable by being heavy or the patches can start itching. More measurements by nurses can take place when indicated, for example after alarms. The participating patients will fill out the STAI on daily basis and the PCS on the last day of hospitalization. Both questionnaires will take a few minutes to complete. Patients could benefit from early detection of clinical deterioration and early corrective interventions or ICU admissions.