Sensor Technologies’ new remote-sensing product, WREN, continuously monitors the atmospheric conditions of a room to detect incontinence events.
Short for Watch, Respond, Evaluate and Notify, WREN continually samples the air temperature and humidity in resident rooms and identifies anomalous changes of specific gaseous profiles. Using a machine learning algorithm, the system pinpoints accidental bowel movements and issues alerts to speed up facility response.
“If you can reduce the amount of time between an event and when it’s taken care of, it benefits everyone,” said co-founder Brad Ansley, who first dreamed up the concept that became WREN while sleep training his infant daughter. “There’s really nothing else out there like this.”
The first WREN system is being installed at Villa St. Francis Catholic Care Center, a 170-bed skilled nursing facility in Olathe, KS, where WREN has piloted the technology since September.
The system is designed to use one device per room, even in shared rooms, and those devices can be installed by in-house staff. Once working, WREN sends notifications to caregivers through a smartphone app. Ansley noted that limiting skin-to-fecal matter contact “can greatly reduce or eliminate the formation of serious skin issues such as pressure ulcers.”
In addition to reducing labor and laundry costs and unwanted odor, WREN offers a new way of assisting residents during in-room isolation events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic and could reduce unnecessary staff contact.
