Designing better mental healthcare facilities

Vital signs monitoring via optical sensors

Oxehealth, a scientific ‘spin-off’ from the University of Oxford, claims to be the world’s first company to deploy continuous ‘medical-grade’, contact-free vital signs monitoring using low-cost digital optical sensors to mental health services.

The technology, reportedly well-suited to both mental and acute healthcare use, has already been successfully trialled at Broadmoor Hospital and by a major UK police force. Oxehealth’s software enables optical sensors to monitor human activity and vital signs, such as breathing and heart rate. Staff are alerted when no activity is detected in an occupied room, and the system also allows monitoring of whether a patient or service-user is in bed.

Oxehealth – founded by Professor Lionel Tarassenko of the University of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering – says its team is able to extract medical grade vital signs, human activity, and behavioural data, by applying computer vision, signal processing, and machine learning expertise, to extract useful data from optical sensor signals. The technology is ‘wrapped in a sophisticated enterprise solution that lives in a private cloud’.

Oxehealth’s Video Analytics solution alerts staff when no human activity is detected in a room, while its Medical Analytics solution uses photoplethysmography – ‘the science used by finger pulse oximeters’ – to monitor heart rate, and ‘detects minute mechanical movements of the body to determine breathing rate’.

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