Innovation at the service of the Montreal Children’s Hospital | The thread of the regions | News | The gallery

L‘The Montreal Children’s Hospital could soon become one of the first on the planet, if not the first, to monitor the vital signs of its little patients wirelessly, which would increase their quality of life and simplify the task of healthcare professionals .

A premature baby hospitalized in intensive care, for example, is currently attached to monitors that show his heart rate, skin temperature and oxygen levels in his blood. Another sensor will sound the alarm in the event of sleep apnea.

The goal of the project is to take advantage of technological advances to eliminate all these threads without compromising the quality of care offered.

“This is a project that we have been thinking about for a few years,” explained one of the project managers, Doctor Guilherme Sant’Anna. Essentially, we’re trying to innovate by developing new technology that can pick up important patient signs and send them to wireless monitors.

“We would then use artificial intelligence or machine learning to store and analyze these signals.”

The project, which will run over five or six years, is still in its infancy. It receives support from the Montreal Children’s Hospital Foundation, to the tune of $ 6 million.

Multiple advantages

The first patients who could benefit from it are those who are often considered to be the sickest and most fragile in the hospital, said Dr Sant’Anna.

“Patients in neonatal intensive care are the most complex and the most critical,” he said. Once it works with these babies, it will be easy to go further ”.

The absence of sons, for example, could make it easier for the parents of these babies to stick them against them to give them that human contact they so badly need.

Older patients could potentially enjoy much greater mobility, whether it’s to travel elsewhere in the hospital or even to get home while their health is still being looked after from a distance.

For health personnel, the establishment of such a “smart hospital” would facilitate access to patients when the time comes to provide care. Vital signs would also be recorded automatically, freeing nurses to otherwise enter them in writing.

“The threads also require maintenance to avoid infections, it must be cleaned,” said Dr Sant’Anna. It is much more cumbersome to have all that around the patient. ”

Artificial intelligence could finally support physicians in making clinical decisions and even warn of possible unwanted side effects.

Technological advances

When you realize that a system that just monitors the heartbeat – and nothing else – of babies in intensive care can cost at least $ 1 million, the interest in developing a more versatile system (and one that could eventually be sold to other hospitals) quickly becomes evident.

Doctor Sant’Anna and his colleagues have been thinking about this project for about fifteen years.

“In our daily life, technology keeps improving, it goes so fast, that we said to ourselves that we needed something better for our patients,” he explained. The way we monitor our patients is still very simple compared to other technologies. ”

That being said, the task of work that awaits them is colossal since it would seem that nothing like this has ever been done elsewhere in the world and therefore they are essentially starting from scratch.

The Montreal Children’s Hospital could therefore be the first to attempt to determine whether the technologies currently available on the market can be bundled and used to improve patient care.

“Several companies are developing systems around the world,” explained Dr. Sant’Anna. But we have to see, when we put them all together, if they work as well or better than what we already have. You have to compare current technology with new technology. It will give us confidence that it will work and we will be able to give more scope to the project. ”

If all goes well, the first practical applications of the project could occur in six months.

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