In remotely installing a software upgrade for all of its U.S. customers, the maker of a "smart bed" system for hospitals and post-acute rehab facilities, claims to have developed the country's first application that biometrically validates bed position changes through a secure, cloud-based monitoring platform.

The new Position Change feature from BAM Labs, Campbell, Calif., an optional feature in the latest update to Bam Labs Health Monitoring app, verifies whether a patient has changed positions in bed. This helps assure that patients are turned regularly to avoid pressure ulcers and alerts staff in case of a bed exit that can lead to a fall.

The app, which supports BAM's Touch-free Life Care, or TLC, smart bed system, is available not only though the Web, but for Apple iOS mobile devices. Users can get immediate alerts on their iPhones and iPads in case of motion that could be the precursor to a fall. Bam reports that facilities using the app have seen a 43 percent reduction in falls out of bed and an hour of daily staff time saved per bed.

"Since starting the smart bed program, we’ve had improved outcomes on those clients using the technology. It took a couple weeks to gain valuable data which allowed us to trend daily movement patterns with each client. With this data and the technical applications, we were able to develop custom programs to intervene before incidents could occur," Eric Mock, administrator at Winter Park (Fla.) Care and Rehabilitation, says in a Bam Labs press release.

The new release now can run on wireless network connections as slow as 256 kilobytes per second, according to Bam Labs, but it also supports WPA/WPA2 security.

As MobiHealthNews has reported, the TLC system is a mattress pad that detects patient motion as well as biometric signals such as heart rate and respiration. It transmits readings over the hospital or other healthcare facility's network to Bam's cloud for instant analysis, and data can be exported into electronic health records.