Long gone are the days when hospital-grade vital sign monitoring required carts full of equipment, all attached to patients using a tangle of wires, sensors and probes. Now, compact and wireless wearable devices can churn out just as many measurements—if not more—on a constant basis, including body temperature, heart and respiratory rate, infection-related symptoms and more.
Medtronic has added one such device to its patient monitoring portfolio, thanks to a new partnership with BioIntelliSense, the medtech giant announced Wednesday. Medtronic will have exclusive rights within the U.S. to distribute BioIntelliSense’s BioButton continuous monitoring wearable. It’ll be available for use both within hospital settings and throughout the first 30 days of patients’ transitions from the hospital to the home.
Situating the BioButton under Medtronic’s umbrella—which covers more than 100 million hospital patients per year, according to the company—will be especially beneficial in helping hospitals navigate the growing shortage of healthcare workers and rising healthcare costs, per BioIntelliSense CEO James Mault, M.D.
“This advanced remote physiologic monitoring simplifies care delivery to facilitate personalized patient care, clinical workflow automation and proactive clinical interventions,” Mault said.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The BioButton is a small device—about an inch in diameter—that sticks to a patient’s chest for 90 days or more. It works around the clock to gather vital sign measurements, collecting as many as 1,440 readings each day.
The medical-grade device captures nearly two dozen data points including skin temperature, resting heart and respiratory rate, body position, activity level and sleep performance. It also performs gait analysis, tracking step symmetry, cadence and strength, and can pick up on symptoms like vomiting, sneezing and coughing that may indicate an infection.
All of those measurements are automatically sent via Bluetooth to BioIntelliSense’s mobile app and online portal. There, clinicians can access reports illustrating the progress of their patients’ vital sign readings over time. The system can be programmed to send alerts if those readings leave specified ranges.
The original iteration of the BioButton—which was introduced in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic—was equipped with a battery that would last 90 days before the device had to be removed and thrown away. Earlier this year, however, BioIntelliSense unveiled a rechargeable model of the wearable that can be worn for much longer with recharge sessions about every two weeks.