University of Missouri (MU) Health Care is an academic health care system that provides comprehensive inpatient and outpatient services.
The purpose of this study was to test the implementation of a fall detection and “rewind” privacy-protecting technique to not only detect but prevent falls from occurring in hospitalized patients. Kinect sensors were placed in six hospital rooms in a step-down unit and data were continuously logged.
This technological approach enables conducting quality improvement root-cause analysis of patient falls to “see” what happened leading up to the actual fall. It also offers future research opportunities for real-time staff notification of potential falls or increasing fall risk.