In the United States, between 700,000 and 1 million people in hospital fall each year. Patients who find it difficult to walk alone often get up from bed and try to walk on their own. The patient’s health suffers from a further downward curve.
To prevent this, smart socks have been developed that connect to a sensor and send a warning when the patient gets up from the bed and applies force to get up. The smart socks send a warning through a badge-type warning device worn by the three closest nurses. If no one responds within a minute, it goes to the next two closest nurses. If no one responds within 90 seconds, an alert is sent to all nurses wearing the badge.
The researchers observed the fall prevention effect over 13 months of wearing the socks on 569 patients at high risk of falling in the hospital. No other fall prevention systems, such as chair or bed alarms, were used.
As a result, there was not a single fall accident. This was a record of 0 cases per 1000 patient days, overshadowing the historical low of 4 cases per 1000 patient days. The number of patient days is a unit representing the frequency of falls compared to the number of beds in the hospital during the study period.
During the study period, the number of alerts issued by smart socks was 5010. Of these, 11 cases were judged to be misidentified, which means that the accuracy was 99.8%. The nurse response time ranged from 1 second to 10 minutes, but averaged 24 seconds.
“More research is needed, but it makes sense to use these smart socks in hospital rooms, nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities,” said Temi Moore, assistant nurse at the Ohio State Institute of Neurology and OSU Medical Center’s surgery, and first author of the paper. In fact, the researchers plan to test the smart socks in more hospitals, he said.
Meghan Dunning, co-chair of the Fall Surveillance Committee at Rush Medical Center in the U.S., who reviewed the study, said, “There was no fall during the testing period, nurses’ reaction time was fast, and the malfunction rate was low, so the introduction of these socks is worth considering.” said How much it costs might be the key, he points out.
So far, the only alternative to reducing falls has been to make the patient walk, he added. “There is nothing better than keeping you walking to prevent worsening of your condition and complications during your hospital stay.”
Katherine Sakissian, a gerontologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), agrees that it’s really important to get people up and walking. In that regard, wearing smart socks can have the side effect of keeping patients in bed. “Even if smart socks prevent falls in hospitals, they can cause more disability and frailty,” he said. .
Nevertheless, the risk of falls in hospitals is so great that the preventive effects of wearing smart socks cannot be ignored, he said. Another alternative to preventing falls is to take vitamin D. “For patients with vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D supplementation is effective in reducing the number of falls,” said Professor Sikasian.
By Han Gun-pil, reporter hanguru@kormedi.com
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