ivWatch Patient Monitor and SmartTouch Sensor
Continuous Monitoring of IVs
Intravenous (IV) insertion is the most common hospital procedure, yet IVs fail more often than people think—and nearly a quarter of those failures are due to forms of leakage called infiltration and extravasation. This often leads to severe consequences including drug delivery errors, scarring, staining, nerve damage, amputation, and even death. While continuous monitors for a patient’s heart rate and blood oxygen level are now standard in hospitals, no technology has been available to continuously monitor an IV site and notify clinicians when essential fluids and medications begin leaking into surrounding tissue.
ivWatch is changing that. Holding 69 patents, the company has developed a first-of-its-kind Class II medical device, cleared by the FDA and CE Marked, that uses a predictive algorithm and near-infrared light to see changes in the optical properties of the tissue around an IV site, continuously monitoring peripheral IVs, and aiding in the early detection of infiltration and extravasation events. Applied to the skin, ivWatch sensors perform over 18,000 checks per hour for any signs of IV infiltration and extravasation, alerting healthcare workers in real time so severe negative outcomes can be avoided.
In July 2023, a study published in The Journal of Vascular Access (JVA) examined the performance of the ivWatch patient monitoring system in a 24-bed neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in the Netherlands. It found that the ivWatch system detects Peripheral Intravenous Infiltration and Extravasation (PIVIE) events earlier than when relying on intermittent visual observation alone, and detection occurred in 100% of leakage events prior to a clinician detecting such an event.
