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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Harris Tsimenidis, Emeritus Professor Alan MurrayORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Electrocardiograms (ECGs) recorded from patients in intensive care wereinvestigated to quantify any relationship between ECG signal quality and falsemonitoring alarms. False alarms are a considerable problem for nursing andmedical staff as they distract from clinical care, and are also a problem forpatients as they disturb rest, which is important for clinical recovery. ECG andalarm data were obtained for 750 patient alarms from the PhysioNet database.The final 8 s period before the alarm was triggered was investigated. All but oneECG channel in 38 ECG recordings with out-of-range data were associated withfalse positive alarms ( p < 0.0001). The frequency contributions for baseline (BL)instability, electromyogram (EMG) muscle noise, and high frequency (HF) noisewere calculated. For all three frequency bands, the contributions associated withfalse positive alarms were very significantly greater than for true positive alarms( p < 0.0001). The greatest difference was for BL with a mean level for falsepositive alarms 4.0 times greater than for true positive alarms, followed by EMGand HF at 1.6 times and 1.4 times respectively. These results confirm that attentionneeds to be taken to improve ECG signal quality to reduce the frequency ofclinical false alarms, and hence improve conditions for clinical staff and patients.
Author(s): Tsimenidis C, Murray A
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Physiological Measurement
Year: 2016
Volume: 37
Issue: 8
Pages: 1383-1391
Online publication date: 25/07/2016
Acceptance date: 09/05/2016
Date deposited: 03/08/2016
ISSN (print): 0967-3334
ISSN (electronic): 1361-6579
Publisher: Institute of Physics Publishing
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0967-3334/37/8/1383
DOI: 10.1088/0967-3334/37/8/1383
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