Monitoring with every breath you take
Media release 21 September 2004

A new technology, invented in Australia, is allowing anaesthetists to keep their eye on the job.

When clinicians anaesthetise a patient, there are a lot of things they need to keep an eye on – the patient’s breathing, their heart rate and blood pressure, all while conducting other visually demanding task such as inserting IVs or intubating the patient.
 

A new technology is taking away some of the demands on the anaesthetist’s visual attention, instead allowing them to monitor the patient’s breathing with sound.

This is so-called “eyes-free monitoring”.

“The “beep, beep, beep” heart monitor (a continuous auditory pulse oximeter) has been around since the 1980s. Most people will recognise it from medical documentaries and hospital dramas. It is currently the most effective tool for detecting when things go wrong,” says Marcus Watson, one of the inventors of the new machine and a Fresh Innovator finalist.

“What we’ve invented is basically the same thing except for respiration. The machine measures the patient’s breathing rate, length of inhalation, length of exhalation, volume and rate of gas exchange and expired carbon dioxide and provides the information in an audible way. It is a very gentle two-tone sound.”

Currently this information is only available visually.

“It is estimated that 93% of potential patient incidents could be detected with the combination of the respiratory sonification and a pulse oximeter (a machine that measures the pulse),” says Marcus. “Our respiratory sonification means critical care staff can detect changes in the patient much earlier than they could with current systems.”

Using the respiratory sonification on simulated patients, anaesthetists were able to monitor the patients just as effectively with the respiratory sonification as they could with a standard visual display. And they were able to perform other timeshared duties better when relying on the respiratory sonification.

This research will be appearing in the journal Human Factors in Summer 2004.

The respiratory sonification can be used as part of existing hospital patient monitors or it could be produced as a portable monitoring unit for medical transportation and paramedic work.

Marcus, together with his co-inventor Professor Penelope Sanderson, are aiming to conduct further simulation and clinical trials with anaesthetist colleagues at Royal Adelaide Hospital (Dr W. John Russell), Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and the Royal North Shore Hospital Simulation Centre in NSW.

Marcus is one of 16 early-career inventors who are presenting their work to the public, businesses and the media as part of Fresh Innovators – a national competition supported by the Department of Industry, Tourism and Resources through the National Innovation Awareness Strategy. One of the 16 will win a study tour to the UK courtesy of the British Council Australia.

About the Inventor

Marcus developed the respiratory sonification with Professor Sanderson during his PhD at Swinburne University of Technology under the supervision of Sanderson.
 

He is currently working with the Cognitive Engineering Research Group, at the ARC Key Centre for Human Factors and Applied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Queensland: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/cerg and http://www.humanfactors.uq.edu.au.

For interview or more information: Dr Marcus Watson 07 3346 8743 /0415 724 609 mwatson@humanfactors.uq.edu.au  

Prototype available for viewing.

Hear the Respiratory Sonificator (breathing)

Hear the Pulse Oximetry (beep beep machine)