Hospital beds may soon be another resource to help medical teams continuously monitor patients. This morning Hill-Rom, a medical technology company best known for its hospital beds, announced that it is integrating EarlySense’s contact free monitor into its Centrella model bed. 

Early Sense’s heart rate and respiratory rate sensing technology will now be integrated into Centrella, a smart hospital bed. In a statement, the companies claim that the new technology will be able to measure heart rate and respiratory rate over 100 times per minute.  

Why it matters

The technology was designed to help clinicians identify patients who are in need of intervention before they deteriorate. In a 2014 Harvard Medical School study, EarlySense’s under-the-mattress and bedside monitor reduce the rate of code blue events by 86 percent. The study also showed a 45 percent reduction in in the average stay of ICU patients transferred from the medical-surgical unit. 

The deal with Hill-Rom will significantly increase the reach of the technology.

“Integrating EarlySense monitoring capabilities with the Hill-Rom Centrella bed platform will advance our collective aspiration of having every patient in every hospital continuously monitored for safe, data-driven care, with the potential to save thousands of lives and significant costs for the healthcare system,” Avner Halperin, cofounder and CEO of EarlySense, said in a statement. 

The trend 

Early sense is one of the major players in continuous monitoring technologies. The company got its start in hospitals and gained its first FDA clearance in 2010 for an under-the-mattress sensor. The company soon expanded to chair sensors, also aimed at a hospital market. 

Eventually EarlySense moved towards expanding its sensors for direct-to-consumer use. Its offerings now include a monitor, called the Live Family Health Monitoring Kit, that helps caregivers track a dependent’s health remotely. 

It even dipped into fertility monitoring. At last year’s CES it launched a product called Percept, which was an under-mattress, clinically-proven fertility monitor that tracks the users’ dates of ovulation, fertility window and period by monitoring physiological signals like heart rate and breathing patterns. 

On the record

“Hill-Rom’s Centrella bed is transforming inpatient care by integrating advanced sensing and analytics into the bed, offering a complete patient safety platform to assist clinicians in providing the highest level of care,” John Groetelaars, president and CEO of Hill-Rom, said in a statement. “EarlySense has been used to effectively monitor close to a million patients, positively affecting patient outcomes. By integrating the EarlySense technology into our Centrella beds, we are ushering in a new era in quality of care, whereby all patients can be continuously monitored throughout their entire hospital stay.”