Patient Monitoring

Articles on patient monitoring across clinical settings, including wearable devices, physiological signals, hospital and ICU monitoring, and digital technologies for continuous observation.

When the Average Misleads: Heart Rate Variability from Mean Heart Rate to Autonomic Dynamics

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Vintage medical illustration of an early 20th-century doctor studying an electrocardiograph displaying a mix of normal ECG waveforms and surreal, distorted heart rhythm patterns beside a patient in a hospital bed.

Mean heart rate is one of the most familiar numbers in medicine. Useful, immediate, and often enough for a first description. Yet every average carries the same defect: it compresses into a single value everything that happened over time. Two patients can share a mean of 70 beats per minute (bpm) and, across the same … Read more

From Chart to Variable: Extracting Computable Clinical Features from the EHR

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Early 20th-century doctor looks perplexed at a bedside table crowded with medicine vials and bottles in an old hospital ward.

Vasoactive-Inotropic Score as a Worked Example Introduction: The Data Is There. The Variable Is Not. Every conversation about clinical AI opens on the same premise: hospitals are sitting on enormous quantities of data. True enough, and almost useless as a starting point. An electronic health record is a transactional system, built for documentation, for billing, … Read more

From Smartwatch to ICU: 5 Breakthroughs Revolutionizing Hospital Monitoring

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Early 20th-century doctor standing beside a bedridden patient in a dim hospital ward, while an ornate medical machine emits glowing concentric waves across the room in a warm, painterly historical style.

How wearable devices and artificial intelligence are dismantling the wire-bound paradigm of intensive care—one sensor at a time. By Michele D. Pierri, MD, PhD In This Article Introduction: The Modern Monitoring Paradox A substantial share of adults now wear a device capable of tracking heart rate (HR), blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), and sleep architecture. Yet … Read more