Before Christmas Break, we met with the Vanderbilt NICU team to discuss the extent of sensor use and to refine our goals and potential deliverables for the next four months. We also discussed the longevity of the project beyond the scope of our involvement for our remaining time on campus. Due to the high number of sensors that would be required for tracking babies in the hospital, all parties involved have decided to begin with tracking physician teams. These teams will be tracked in the three areas of the Vanderbilt NICU within the Children’s Hospital as well as an expensive and valuable piece of equipment that is often misplaced in the hospital. The tracking of the teams will allow for nurses to know the location of physicians during their rounds and if they have responded to patients when codes are called. Often when a code is called, the physicians are paged repeatedly even after they have arrived at the patient in need. This causes unwanted distraction during a critical time. Our decision to initially track physicians was confirmed because the sensor tags can serve as potential vectors of infection placing the babies at risk. In addition, there is great difficulty associated with selecting an unobtrusive spot to place the tag on the isolet. As the technology progresses, we envision tracking of all babies in the NICU to update in real-time on the display.
Over Christmas Break, the Vanderbilt and Synapse Teams met to discuss the future plan to implement the first round of sensors into the NICU. Firstly, we need plant operations to approve installation. Dr. Walsh is in contact with plant operations and this approval process is underway. The installation of these devices will be a critical step in catalyzing the progress of our design. Tentatively we anticipate installing at least 4 sense points located at the designated points seen below in Figure 1. More than 4 sense points may be required for accurate locating. This is under review by Synapse’s Professional Services Organization.
Figure 1: Vanderbilt NICU Layout
With these decisions made, we have began to research several platforms for creating touch-screen display systems. This software must be able to be edited to allow for physicians or nurses to enter data about patients as well as display the location of the tags in real-time through syncing with the Sensepoint sensors. Ideally in the future, this platform would “talk to” each patient’s EHR to reduce the workload of the nurses as well as prevent any errors in transcription. Thus far, we have looked into Bunkr, which allows for the creation of web-based apps and presentations, created through Appvita. We also researched the platform SlideDog. Unfortunately, we do not think that these platforms have the capability of updating automatically from location data. Another potential platform is Touchdevelop. We are still determining the capabilities of this platform. So far, we have spent the most time researching Intuiface by Intuilab, a platform to develop interactive digital experiences. This platform has proved most promising. However, the platform is not compatible with OS X, which may prove challenging in editing on an iPad. Furthermore, the free version of the platform has limited capabilities. We are still considering this platform for our development, but we are also researching other options.
Looking ahead, we believe it will be valuable for us to have an in-depth understanding of HIPAA regulations so that we can tailor our display to work within those regulations. We will also be spending an extensive amount of time working with whatever platform we choose to design our product. We will be keeping in close contact with the Synapse team in order to begin working with the sensors immediately after their completed installation. Finally, we will focus a large portion of our time toward crafting a systems requirements document that we will not only guide the development of our product but also allow a medical student in the NICU who is doing a similar project to benefit from our findings.