Detecting Post-surgical Respiratory Compromise and Prompting Patients to Self-rescue: An Early Feasibility Study

This study will explore the feasibility of an idea to use standard, FDA-approved patient monitors to detect ventilatory depression and then play a recorded nurse's voice to prompt patients by name to breathe. The voice prompt will occur in addition to when the traditional alarms are sounded by the monitors. The study device consists of commercially available physiologic monitors, a speaker, and a laptop computer. The physiologic monitors include a pulse oximeter with a motion sensor, capnometer, and nasal airway pressure sensor (built into a nasal cannula). Nasal pressure is a commonly used clinical monitor for sleep apnea detection during polysomnography testing in sleep labs.

The study will be conducted in patients that are admitted to the hospital following surgery. Patients will be monitored during the first 24 hours after surgery, first in the recovery room (post anesthesia care unit, or PACU) and then on the hospital floor. The study will enroll patients with a high likelihood of experiencing ventilatory depression and/or partial to complete airway obstruction. This patient group includes those with known or suspected obstructive sleep apnea and those with surgeries associated with moderate to severe postoperative pain that require significant opioid administration after surgery. The study will compare effectiveness of prompting patients to breathe to that of routine clinical practice in the PACU and hospital floor. The hypothesis is that when compared to standard monitoring and interventions by clinical staff, the digitized breath prompting will prompt patients to breathe more quickly, which will lead to higher oxygen-hemoglobin saturations and respiratory rates throughout the first 24 hours of a patient's hospital stay following surgery.

For patient safety purposes, the experimental design of this study will implement this device as a shadow monitor. Patients will be instrumented with standard physiologic monitors per routine practice in each hospital location (PACU and floor). There will be no change in how clinical staff interacts with patients (i.e. prompting to breathe, checking vital signs, administering medications, assessing patient well-being, etc.) Clinical staff may disable the device at any time if patient comfort or safety are in question.

This study involves use of already cleared medical devices in which they are used in accordance with the indications in the cleared labeling. What is unique is that output from these monitoring devices will be used to prompt a patient directly by name to breathe. The goal of this study is to test the feasibility of the idea that patients will respond to prompts to breathe by a digitized prompting system. If the concept is successful in patients after surgery, as it was for healthy volunteers in previous testing, future research steps would include designing a device and testing it in a clinical trial on patients on the general floor.