REWOC: Remote Early Warning of Out-of-ICU Crashes in COVID Care Areas using IoT Device

COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the capabilities of hospital healthcare delivery systems worldwide. Among patients admitted in hospitals, sudden severity deterioration leading to out-of-ICU ward crashes are observed in many care areas. During the current pandemic, the major gap in the timely identification of COVID patient deterioration is due to the isolation precautions precluding continuous patient monitoring in wards. To address this challenge, we developed and deployed a wearable IoT integrated system called Remote Early Warning of Out-of-ICU Crashes (REWOC in short), which consists of wearable devices at the patient end and early warning score integrated dashboards for physicians and nurses to monitor patients remotely. We describe the architecture and design of REWOC as well as our deployment experience of REWOC on COVID patients in a large hospital in India. To our knowledge, this is one of the first reports of a real-world deployment using wearable devices for monitoring out-of-ICU ward crashes among COVID patients.