Tracking how people respond to infection
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Defining responses to infection and antibiotic treatment using wearable devices
IRAS ID
349777
Contact name
David Eyre
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Research Governance, Ethics and Assurance
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 2 months, 30 days
Research summary
Key point: We want to find out if new devices worn by hospital patients with infections can help work out who is responding well to antibiotics.
When someone with an infection arrives at hospital, it is not always possible to know what antibiotic is best to use. Tests that help pick the right antibiotic depend on growing bacteria in a lab, which can take 1-3 days, and do not work in every patient. However, most sick patients need antibiotics straight away. Doctors choose the antibiotic they think is most likely to work, but it is not always possible get this right.
Rather than waiting for lab test results, we would like to see if following patients more closely with new technology could help work out faster who is getting better and who might need their antibiotics changing. We plan to use a small skin patch worn on the chest to monitor “vital signs”, like how fast the heart is beating, a person is breathing, or how much they are moving. Some, but not all, of these things are recorded by nurses, but usually only once every 4-6 hours, compared to every second with the new devices.
We will recruit 200 participants admitted to hospital with suspected infection.
We want to see if using statistics and “AI” (artificial intelligence) to track outputs from these devices could help spot different patterns in how patients with infections respond to antibiotics, including normal recovery and where patients are not recovering as expected. We also want to see if we can use this data to spot sooner which patients are not recovering properly. We will also check how reliable these wearable devices are.
If our study is successful, it could help lead to more patients getting the right antibiotics earlier and better outcomes from infections.
REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
25/SC/0059
Date of REC Opinion
5 Mar 2025
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion