Wireless Cardiac System Monitors Entire Hospital Population

A new patient monitoring system supervises the electrical activity of the heart in order to protect the unmonitored hospital patient population in the event of a life-threatening heart rhythm.

The NetGuard system is simple, clinically effective, and automatic. The heart of the system is a very small wireless electrocardiogram (EKG) monitor, weighing less than 30 grams. The monitor communicates with a standard personal computer (PC) at a nurse's station, which has the capacity to cover 50 patients. The system alerts the nurse and generates an EKG display when a dangerous rhythm is detected. The nurse would then typically confirm the alert and call an emergency in accordance with hospital protocol.

The single-use component of the monitor, including batteries, electrode, and adhesive pad are packaged together in a detachable unit that mates with a reusable electronic unit. The batteries in the NetGuard monitor last three days, three times longer than conventional telemeters. The system architecture of NetGuard provides for total coverage of a hospital, and the cost of the wireless system components, including the reusable portion of the EKG monitor, is a fraction of the cost of conventional monitors. NetGuard is a product of Datascope (Montvale, NJ, USA).

"We've been concerned for some time by reports of numerous and high profile incidents of patients dying of arrhythmia while unmonitored,” said Larry Saper, founder and CEO of Datascope. "With advances in technology, and proprietary innovations from our talented product development staff, we've been able to develop NetGuard which fulfills our long-awaited goal of creating a practical monitoring system to protect all patients who are currently unmonitored.”

Continuous monitoring of patients in hospitals is hampered by the cost of conventional patient monitoring equipment and by the cost of 24-hour staffing required by conventional central monitoring stations, which often exceeds the cost of the monitoring equipment. Consequently, a large majority of patients in hospitals throughout the world are currently unmonitored.


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