Continuous wireless monitoring during labour can indicate risk of EOS

A new study has concluded that the use of a continuous wireless patient monitoring system that monitors a mother’s temperature during labour could aid detection of newborn infants at risk of early onset sepsis (EOS) faster than current practice, enabling earlier and more effective targeted treatment of affected infants.

Maternal fever during labour is a strong predictor of EOS. Current standard obstetric practice is to measure oral temperature intermittently, which means symptoms of fever can sometimes be missed. Using the Patient Status Engine, a wireless monitoring platform designed and developed by Isansys Lifecare, a clinical team at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New York, compared continuous and intermittent (standard care) temperature data from over 150 women during labour. They concluded that continuous measurement of maternal temperature provides better data than manual oral observations for predicting which babies may have a higher risk of infection in their first few days of life.

REFERENCE

Koppel R et al. Efficacy of continuous monitoring of maternal temperature during labor using wireless axillary sensors. J Clin Monitor Comput 2020: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10877-020-00625-5