The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted marketing clearance to EarlySense's Chair Sensor Solution.

The Chair Sensor, which continuously monitors patient’s heart rate, respiratory rate and movement, was recently evaluated at Coffee Regional Medical Center where it successfully enabled the clinical team to proactively respond to early signs of patient deterioration and to prevent patient falls. This is the first contact free sensor for vital signs in a chair.

Clinicians have long known that ambulating patients from bed to chair improves healing, reduces the risk of complications and shortens length of stay. Moving around in an upright position appears to be of most benefit in the early post-operative period and to improve lung function and reduce potential pulmonary complications. But to date there was not automatic contact-free solution for keeping patients safe in their chairs.

Continuous patient monitoring is a key factor in recognizing and promptly responding to early warning signs, and facilitates timely interventions for non-ICU patients. Peer reviewed clinical trials have shown that responding to early warning signs significantly improve patient safety and hospitals’ economic outcomes. The EarlySense Chair Sensor is the tool that empowers clinical staff to provide proactive effective, timely interventions when patients are deteriorating or at risk of falling, therefore, accelerating recuperation and reducing risks.

“The chair sensor fits the workflow here very nicely”, said SueLane Hughes, Director Medical/OPO Unit at Coffee Regional Medical Center. “The biggest advantage of the chair sensor is that it monitors the patient when sitting on the chair and doesn’t require any user contact. We found it to be very useful in giving the clinical team information about their patients, no matter if they were in bed or sitting in the chair. The EarlySense System is allowing the medical staff to recognize potential adverse events prior to them becoming acute events that potentially put patients in jeopardy. The chair sensor is another tool to assist us in preventing patient falls by getting staff into patients’ rooms before they have exited the chair. Since we started using the chair sensor we have had zero patient falls from chairs.”

According to Avner Halperin, CEO of EarlySense “Medical institutions have often expressed the need for automatic sensing in chairs. Hospitals have used the EarlySense bed sensor solution to make their beds a smart, safe place for more than 100,000 patients. Hospitals have shown us that they value smart beds, now for the first time they can get ‘smart chairs’. In addition, with a chair sensor we believe that a number of other clinical environments will open up to the EarlySense System, such as Emergency Departments, Outpatient Clinics and waiting areas where concern around patients may exist and today there is no practical way to monitor patients.”

EarlySense, the market leader in contact-free and continuous patient monitoring, assists clinicians in early detection of patient deterioration and in identifying and preventing potential adverse events such as patient falls and pressure ulcers.