An Israeli wearable technology for quantifying pain has been included in newly updated “Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management of Pain, Agitation, and Delirium in Adult Patients in the Intensive Care Unit,” developed for the Society of Critical Care Medicine by international experts and critical illness survivors.
The technology, called NOL (nociception level index), was invented at Medasense Biometrics www.medasense.com of Ramat Gan to help clinicians optimize the delivery of pain medication by objectively assessing pain in situations where patients are unable to communicate, especially in critical care and surgery under general anesthesia.
The index presents the patient’s pain state on a scale of 0 to 100 on a proprietary monitoring device.
The company also is reporting results of its first clinical studies. The first, carried out at Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands, demonstrates that using the NOL method significantly reduced opioid consumption and improved hemodynamic (blood pressure) stability in patients undergoing major surgery.
A second study, carried out at the Université Catholique de Lovain in Belgium, indicates that NOL monitoring may predict early and longer-term postoperative pain.
“The latest clinical evidence clearly indicates the potential of our technology to improve patient care and empower clinicians in this mission. We believe these results are just the first marker of the potential benefit NOL technology holds, with many others to come in the near future,” said Medasense founder and CEO Galit Zuckerman-Stark.
NOL is commercially available in Europe, Canada, Australia and Israel, but not yet in the United States.