Remote patient monitoring wearables are patches or bands worn on the body that measure pulse, breathing and other vital signs all day, and send them to software that alerts a nurse when a reading goes wrong. Vital signs are the basic measures of how the body is doing: heart rate, breathing rate, blood oxygen, temperature and blood pressure. These wearables let a hospital keep watching a patient who is on a general ward, or who has been sent home.
On a general ward, a nurse usually checks each patient's vital signs every four to six hours. A patient can get worse quietly between two checks. In intensive care, a patient monitor watches all the time, but it needs wires and a bed. A wearable patch does a similar job without wires. It is stuck on the chest and records the heart's signals, breathing and movement. A finger or wrist sensor adds blood oxygen. The patch sends the readings over Bluetooth to a phone or a small hub, and from there to the hospital's software.
The software looks at changes over time rather than at single numbers. It learns each patient's normal pattern and flags what departs from it. This is called anomaly detection. For instance, a 70-year-old woman is sent home from a hospital in Hyderabad, four days after treatment for pneumonia, wearing a patch for two weeks. On her third day at home, her resting heart rate rises from 78 to 104 over six hours. Her breathing rate rises from 16 to 24 breaths a minute, and her blood oxygen falls to 91%. No single reading is alarming. Together, they match the early signs that her infection is returning. The software raises an alert for the hospital's monitoring nurse, who calls her and arranges for her to be seen the same day. Her readings are saved to the hospital EHR.
In the United States, some hospitals use these wearables to run a "hospital at home", treating patients at home who would otherwise take a hospital bed. In intensive care, similar feeds go into ICU device integration and early warning systems. Doctors' practices that bill monthly for monitoring read the readings through remote patient monitoring software.
Medicine makers use the same wearables in trials in which patients take part from home, called decentralised clinical trials (DCT).