The completeness, accuracy and impact on alerts, of wearable vital signs monitoring in hospitalised patients.

Background: Use of wearable vital signs sensors (WVSSs) to monitor hospitalised patients is growing but uncertainty exists about how such sensors should be adopted into existing practice. The aim of this observational study was to determine the completeness of data capture and accuracy of measurements recorded by a suite of WVSSs. The implications of using such measurements to derive early warning scores was also assessed. Methods: Adult inpatients with Covid-19 wore four WVSSs recording heart rate/respiratory rate (HR/RR), oxygen saturation (SpO Results: Forty-eight patients were monitored for 204 days with the sensors. Median sensor wear was 3.9(IQR:1.7-5.9), 3.9(IQR:1.6-5.9) and 3.8(IQR:0.9-5.9) days for HR/RR, temperature and SpO Conclusions: Agreement between vital signs recorded by wearable sensors and concurrent traditional vitals is poor. In this context, data from wearable sensors should not be used in existing track and trigger systems. Trial registration: The COSMIC-19 study was registered with clinicaltrials.gov (registration: NCT04581031, date of registration: Oct 6th 2020). Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s44247-025-00151-x.